Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.
And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.
How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?
I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.
Thank you for this! He sounds great.
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For my part, I'm not sure I experience the "paradox of belief." I've never understood why some rationalists act like "faith" is irrational, as if you're only permitted to believe in things that are epistemically certain. Beyond "cogito ergo sum," there's not much knowledge available to us that's not ultimately based on pragmatic leaps of logic. I can't prove that the world outside my head really exists, or that the past and future really exist, or that causation is real. I don't pretend to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem, but my layman's understanding of it is that even math relies on unprovable assumptions to work. And most of what we call "scientific knowledge" is far more tenuous than these propositions: we say that we know, for example, that an oxygen atom has eight protons, but I've never actually checked. I just assume the scientists who say that know what they're talking about and have no reason to lie. (These are not always safe assumptions to make about scientists.) I'm told that a lot of chemical reactions would not work if oxygen had more or less than 8 protons per atom, but again, I have no personal way of knowing whether that's true, beyond my mostly-uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus. In the face of pure, uncompromising skepticism, scientific "knowledge" is just as untenable as religious belief.
We ultimately rely on faith for almost all the knowledge we use--because otherwise we couldn't use any knowledge. Epistemic certainty has to yield to pragmatic utility. Therefore, as long as my religious beliefs aren't provably false (which would be utility-decreasing, because it would cause me to make predictions that turn out to be incorrect, to my detriment), and if those beliefs make me better off (consensus seems to be that religious people tend to be happier and more mentally healthy than nonbelievers), I don't see why it's "irrational" to continue being religious.
Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs; some believe that we're living in a simulation, some believe in panpsychism, some believe we inhabit a multiverse where every possible reality exists at once, etc. I don't see why Christianity is any less compatible with rationalism than these other weird ideas.
Like you, I find Christianity imparts meaning to my life in a way no other worldview can. It has unequivocally improved the quality of my life. The smart thing to do--the rational thing--would be to go on believing it and acting accordingly. I have further thoughts, but I've got to go now.
Because faith is defined as believing something without having a good reason to believe it. If you have a good reason to believe it, then you'd just appeal to the reason and have no need to bring faith into it.
In my experience, atheists/rationalists don't claim that certainty is required to be justified in believing something. As you correctly point out, that would be an absurdly high standard that would commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt.
Not all leaps of logic are equally justified. You may not know anything about the original research that demonstrates how an oxygen atom has eight protons, but you know that scientists have developed systems (that you can distill down to "the scientific method", if you like) to test and discover what things happen to be true about the world we live in and what hypotheses happen not to be true. Planes fly, magic carpets don't. You also know that in general scientists are open about their methods and others who are knowledgeable about the subject matter have the opportunity to replicate and, if appropriate, refute previous findings. If you challenged a scientist of the relevant specialty about whether an oxygen atom has eight protons, you'd know that they'd have the receipts to back it up.
At this point you may be waiting to blurt out "but the replication crisis and the politicization of science!" And you're absolutely correct. But our confidence in any given proposition that comes out of science is proportional to, among other things, how reliable we consider that subfield to be. If we have good reasons to distrust scientists in a particular field of study or doubt a particular finding -- whether because the scientists are politicized (social science) or because figuring out a way to tease out what's actually true is fucking hard (again, social science) -- then we modulate our confidence in any given proposition coming out of that field ("such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" is a cliche for a reason.)
The only reliable alternative to bad science is better science. What else could there even be? Holy books? Podcasters and substackers trying to work it out from first principles? Vibes?
It's irrational if don't have a good reason to believe that it's actually true. It may be that believing in a falsehood can be beneficial, but that's a separate argument from whether it's true. If you want to argue that people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial, you can make that argument (and in this paragraph you seem to be), but be very aware that that's a separate argument from its truth and therefore from whether it's rational to believe that it's true.
And, as an aside, I can't fathom how it could even be possible to believe something that you recognize you have no good reason to be true merely because you think it's beneficial. Belief is an uncontrollable state of being convinced of the actual truth of something, so I can't imagine how belief could even be possible without being convinced of the truth value.
Yes, they do. So don't add to the list.
It's not often that I find myself retreading ground from the Great Atheism War of the Aughts in this era where wokeism has become such a threat that I gleefully find myself allied with evangelicals and even married one and moved to the heart of evangelicalstan to get away from it. But man, I still can't let this shit stand unchallenged.
No. What is faith?
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Do I have faith in Jim? Have I good reason to trust him? Why do I have confidence that he will do what he promises?
Do you have faith in reason? What is the basis of your confidence and belief in its efficacy and veracity?
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Thanks for this thorough response. Just to clarify, I don't think "people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial"--people should aspire to have correct beliefs, even if they get warm, fuzzy feelings from having incorrect beliefs. I think arguments about ideas should be focused on whether the ideas or true, without worrying about the collateral concern of whether they are "beneficial" in some other way. What I do think is that, in areas where "such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" (which covers an enormous amount of the space of possible truth), it's not an irrational heuristic to select among available truth claims the one that adds the most meaning to your life.
I apologize for my flippant "oxygen" example--it was the best I could think of at the time--since I am absolutely happy to defer to scientific consensus (in proportion to the reliability of the subfield) in all matters. I don't believe in young-earth creationism, for instance, even though a lot of Christians do believe in it and have advanced some conveniently non-falsifiable theories explaining away the physical evidence of fossils, radiocarbon dating, etc. The consensus of lots of reliable subfields--geology, biology, astrophysics, etc.--would need to be wrong in order for young-earth creationism to be right. So--like most Christians who aren't fundamentalist Protestants--I'm happy to accept the mainstream scientific view on that question.
But there are some very important questions where there is no scientific consensus: why is there something instead of nothing? What is consciousness? (Incidentally, I'm often confused by the confidence with which atheists reject the possibility of any sort of "afterlife"--they may not know what consciousness is or how it works, but they're positive it disappears when you die! But that's another discussion.) Is morality even real, and if so, how ought we to act? In my view (you may disagree) these questions have resisted scientific explanation since the dawn of time, and they don't seem likely to be scientifically settled anytime soon. I don't want to get too into the weeds of these particular questions, unless you want me to. Suffice it to say that, if we have to wait for "better science" to explain these things, we may be waiting a long time. What should we believe in the meantime? It's not like we can just brush these questions off; they seem super important to any kind of complete worldview! I can't wait for science to catch up; I need to live now!
Finally, I don't know that "being convinced of the truth value" of something is necessary to belief. Being convinced of the falsity of an idea is, of course, fatal to belief--but as long as something could be true, and isn't patently less probable than other competing ideas, I don't see why one couldn't believe it. I think everyone relies on heuristics like "meaning" to select their most important beliefs from among several more-or-less-as-likely ideas.
Why do you feel the need to believe in some explanation for most of these questions? Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?
You're right that these questions are difficult and any solutions/explanations are elusive or woefully incomplete. But it seems to me the only way we're going to solve them, if they are even solvable at all, is by making empirical discoveries about our universe (science) and by applying our capacity to reason. The religious alternative is to believe in explanations given by holy books whose author(s) we have no good reason to believe knew anything more than we do (and usually a lot less). To the extent these holy books have good explanations for any of these questions, we can justify our belief in their explanations by appealing directly to the reasoning and skipping the middle man.
The first problem with that reasoning is that it's not enough for a proposition to be more probable than other competing explanations. Something being 2% probable and all alternatives being <2% probable doesn't mean it's justified to believe it. Which leads to the second problem, which I already mentioned: you're neglecting the possibility of simply not believing any proposition yet offered by anyone.
I could of course quibble over the suggestion that science doesn't have compelling explanations for some or all of the questions you mentioned. But you seem to agree with me that that's a bit of a distraction from the underlying dispute.
(This is tangential to my main point, but just for fun: Is there a probability where it becomes justified to believe something? 2% is too low, but 100% is too high--that would "commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt." Is there a cutoff? If so, where is it and why? Even if you only believe ideas at 99% probability or above, you're still accepting up to a 1% chance that your belief is false. Wouldn't it be safer to say that you simply "don't have a belief on the matter?" On the other hand, if you can believe something at 99%, why not at 80%, or 51%? Why not at, say, 30%, if all the alternatives are even less likely?)
You say "Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?" Good question, and I can't think of a good answer except that it seems painfully unsatisfactory to me, like asking someone starving in the desert "why can't you simply enjoy being hungry?" But I can't help but notice you didn't apply that reasoning to the next big question I mentioned: "how ought we to act?" The is/ought gap can't be bridged empirically. But it has to be bridged somehow--before you can act, you need to know how you ought to act. You can't just throw up your hands and say, "I don't know"; every deliberate action implies a value judgment.
If science is silent on the "ought," then we either need to look outside of science for our values or else give up on objective values altogether. If, as you argue, all beliefs should be scientifically justifiable, then we can't look outside science for our values; therefore, we have no alternative but to abandon the idea of objective values, and with it any ideas about how we "ought" to act.
If this premise: "All beliefs ought to be based on empirical discoveries about the universe"
leads to this conclusion: "Beliefs about what 'ought' to be are baseless and unjustifiable"
then the premise seems to refute itself.
I'm interested to know if you consider yourself a moral realist or not; if you do, how do you respond to this? Apologies if I've grossly misunderstood your position.
We speak of belief as a binary matter - you either believe something or you don't - but in practice it's a matter of degrees of confidence. For any given proposition, you have some degree of confidence in its truth (even if it's near-zero) and at a certain threshold it's high enough that you say you believe it. But it's just semantics.
Well, I'm sorry, but that's just not a good reason to believe something. That doesn't negate the real feelings you describe and the challenge of dealing with them, but it's not going to be convincing to anyone else as a justification for believing what you believe, nor will anyone else be have any reason to think that you're justified in believing it yourself.
It depends on the action. Sometimes our actions are justified based on information we have good reason to believe about the physical world (e.g., floors hold our body's weight, and putting one foot in front of the other repeatedly on this floor will soon take you to your kitchen), or about our minds (e.g., you want to walk to the kitchen because you're hungry).
But your later remarks make me think that what you're really trying to get at is essentially "how do we know how to treat other people", i.e., morality. Well, I think you already know that that's a deeply controversial and unsolved topic at an abstract level. Let's consider the approaches on offer.
Consider the religious approach to morality: that God tells us right from wrong. I think the best rebuttal to that has remained unchanged for a couple thousand years when it was introduced by Plato, if I'm not mistaken. It runs as follows. Suppose God says killing is wrong. Did he have some reason to say that it's wrong? Or could he have just as easily said that it's always right to kill anybody else (in which case it would be right because he said it's right)? If you say either that it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong, well then we can appeal directly to the reason and skip the middle man.
Now consider the non-religious approach to morality, which uses science and reason. Let's start with science. Science can provide us information about the world and the predictable consequences of certain actions. Why is this important? Well, take witchcraft for example. Hunting witches and punishing them isn't actually irrational - if there really was a witch casting spells to harm other people, she really should be punished, or even killed! It only doesn't make sense if witchcraft isn't actually a thing. But belief in witches is nearly a cultural universal among primitive humans because the default operating system of Homo sapiens does not allow much room for the intuition that random bad shit sometimes happens. Rather, if a person you care about gets sick or your crop fails, the primitive human believes there must have been a witch that cast a spell to cause it. Today, science has afforded us actually correct explanations for events that used to be explained by witchcraft. That helps shape our morality - i.e., how we "should" act - in an instance like this.
And science's role in morality is far more extensive than finding better explanations for calamities than witchcraft. Again, it provides a more informed understanding of the physical world, and a large part of determining what actions are moral is going to be contingent upon facts about the world that we just don't know without science. A lot of that will come down to scientific knowledge about the state of brains and the fact that brain states constitute experiences like pain (and thus whether a certain action will predictably cause pain), but it can also include things like understanding the effects of certain pollutants on our bodies and ecosystems (and thus whether dumping certain waste will harm others).
But science can't bridge the is-ought gap. It can tell us "this action causes another person pain", but not "you therefore shouldn't take this action". That's where reason comes in.
Suppose someone were to say, "Why should I care if I cause you pain or kill you? Your pain isn't my pain, and besides, I'd like to take your possessions after I kill you." Well, he won't convince anyone else that only his suffering matters and no one else's, so he is in no position to object if others were to treat him that way. Since no one wants to be treated that way, and since one's power over others is uncertain (tomorrow you might be in a position to be killed by a bigger man or a larger mob), it's in everyone's interest to collectively agree that randomly killing and pillaging is wrong.
Or suppose someone says, "I don't think it's immoral to inflict cruel and torturous punishment on this bread thief because we need to deter criminals. The harm caused by inflicting pain on him is less than the harm caused by undeterred criminals." Indeed, criminal deterrence is a defensible rationale for causing pain. But if the goal is deterrence, then any harm inflicted in excess of that which is necessary to deter criminals is arguably pointless harm and should be avoided. And surely short imprisonment is enough deterrence for theft. Furthermore, there's a problem of perverse incentives: if a man knows he'll be tortured and executed for stealing a loaf of bread, well then he might as well kill the shopkeeper while he's at it. Since there can be no greater punishment than what is already expected for the theft, he is incentivized to maximize his chances of getting away with it by killing the witness. Therefore, it makes more sense to have a sliding scale of punishment for criminal activity.
Those aren't scientific or religious arguments, but the use of such reason together with the better understanding of the world that we get from science provides us the building blocks for morality. Now, people who have read way too much Hume might object that it's still smuggling in certain first principles like "all else being equal, pain is bad". But you can play that game with anything. How do we know that the law of noncontradiction is compelling - that A cannot equal not-A? Well, it just... sorta... is. You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at some point and stop searching for a deeper proposition that isn't self-justifying. And if someone is unconvinced by the starting point that "all else being equal, pain is worse than no pain", then I think that person is either someone with way too much education who likes playing games, or they're not an honest interlocutor.
Not really. I think we all just sort of woke up on this backwater planet in this mysterious universe and are just collectively fumbling our way towards making life better for ourselves using the crude cognitive toolkits we evolved with. That includes figuring out facts about ourselves and the world and using reason to try and persuade each other of the best state of affairs to strive towards.
I do think we have an evolved sense of morality. It seems obvious to me that moral intuitions are innate, and they're certainly a human universal. That doesn't mean those evolved intuitions are actually defensible, though, or provide a good basis for morality. Sometimes they are (e.g., indignation at unfairness) and sometimes they're not (e.g., the lives of that other tribe have no value because they're Others).
Sorry for the late reply; I've had a busy couple days. Thanks for the through response!
You're right, of course, that if morality had some basis more authoritative than God, then God would be a mere "middle man" and would not be necessary to the determination of moral truths. But I don't agree that "it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong." I believe God's nature is the source of goodness; you can't appeal to some standard of goodness higher than God. But it also isn't true to say that God could arbitrarily change good to evil or vice versa; God--being perfect--has no reason to change his nature, and--being omnipotent--his nature can't be changed by anything else. An actions is "good" insofar as it conforms to the immutable will of God.Your "witchcraft" example conflates a factual dispute for a moral dispute: science can tell us whether or not the village witch is guilty of destroying the crops (a factual question), but it can't tell us whether or not people who destroy crops deserve to be punished (a moral question). I think you acknowledge this, since you agree that science can't derive an "ought" from an "is."
Reason can justify an "ought" statement, but only by presupposing a condition: "you ought to exercise if you want to be healthy; you ought to punish criminals if you want to deter crime" etc. So I don't think your examples work:
Plenty of powerful people can say, with a high degree of confidence, that they will*not* be killed tomorrow by a bigger man or a larger mob. Genghis Khan killed and pillaged to his heart's content, and he lived well into his sixties and, by most accounts, died by falling off his horse and/or contracting an illness. Meanwhile, plenty of moral people end up getting killed or pillaged *in spite of* always behaving as if killing and pillaging are wrong. If morality has no better basis than this sort of social-contract-theory, then the Genghis Khans of the world have no use for it.Earlier, you (correctly) pointed out that, if God is a middle man between humans and morality, we can just skip God and go straight to morality. But your own view of morality seems to treat it as a "middle man" for rational self-interest. If Genghis Khan says, "Why don't I skip the morality, and go straight for my own rational self-interest (i.e. killing and pillaging with impunity, because I enjoy it and I'm powerful enough to get away with it)?", how could you dissuade him?
Similarly, while I agree humans generally have evolved a "moral intuition," I don't agree with you that it's "universal." Psychopaths seem to be lacking the moral compunctions that are innate in ordinary humans. And while plenty of psychopaths end up dead or in prison, intelligent and capable psychopaths often become wildly successful. It seems like, above a certain level of intelligence, psychopathy is a very useful trait (which might explain why it hasn't been selected out of existence). So, if you can't appeal to Genghis Khan's moral intuitions, because he wasn't born with them--and if you can't appeal to his rational or game-theoretic self-interest--how do you convince him not to kill and pillage?
The only way I can think of is to convince him that killing and pillaging are not desirable because they are not good. And we know they are not good, because God is good and God is opposed to killing and pillaging. If Genghis Khan continues to kill and pillage, his life will be unfulfilling because he has not followed what is good, and after his death he will be punished by God for disobeying his will.
Now, you may not believe these things, and Genghis Khan may not believe them either. In that case, we're no better off than we would be under your system. But we're no worse off, either. And, at the margins, there are some rare instances where religious appeals appear to have moved otherwise implacable pillagers and conquerors; we'll never know what Pope Leo said during his meeting with Attila the Hun, but we do know the latter subsequently called off the invasion of Rome.
But my arguments about the religious basis of moral truths are, obviously, less relevant to moral non-realists like you than to, say, atheists who still believe in objective morality, like a lot of utilitarians (Scott Alexander's Utilitarian FAQ, for example, never actually explains why anyone should assign value to other people; this seems like it's kind of the entire crux of utilitarianism, but Scott brushes it off as a "basic moral intuition" (section 3.1)). If you're willing to bite the bullet that morality is just a spook, then you have no reason to be troubled by materialism's failure to establish an objective basis for morality. But you also don't have much room to criticize people who are convinced of objective morality, if their convictions turn them away from a materialism that's inadequate to justify moral truths.
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Thank you for the comment, it makes me a little more confident that the sanity waterline rises as well as falls when I see other people articulate much the same arguments as I would have made myself.
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Beautifully said. That's the type of worldview I am moving towards.
Yeah, I feel this keenly! It sometimes seems like more of a fashion thing amongst intellectual circles. Christianity is coded as old and dowdy and uncool. You can have just as crazy beliefs but they're new so people take them more seriously.
I'd love to hear your further thoughts sometime if you feel inclined to write them down.
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I think the rituals are meaningful and good to the extent that they're correct. As a member of a different denomination of Christianity, what I'd say is that the essence of Christ's teachings in Orthodox Christianity is generally correct, but the rituals which have sprung up around them vary in quality depending on how well they reflect those teachings and how much they've drifted from their intended purpose over the years. It's ok to find some things silly or even wrong while still mostly benefitting from church meetings. If anything this is better than the alternative, unless you believe your religion to be completely perfect.
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You don't, while rationality is independent of one's axiomatic beliefs, there's no way you can reconcile epistemic hygiene with "serious" religious practise.
At best you compartmentalize and delude yourself into having belief-in-belief.
Plenty of "serious" rationalists are simulationists; is it so much of a stretch to jump from there to belief that learning about and appeasing the simulator is important?
You yourself believe AI will soon achieve apotheosis, and that simulations theoretically look no different from reality from the inside--is it not thus vastly more likely that we are inside an AI's simulation than not?
I have no strong opinion on the matter, our decision theories are insufficient to the task of giving a firm likelihood of whether we're in a simulation or not.
Barring intentional contact by whatever might be simulating us, or our discovery of a way to break out of the simulation, it's not really possible to tell if they're competent. Any errors or glitches can be trivially retconned out of existence if they cared, assuming we could even recognize them as such. It's entirely possible that we might just assume they're new aspects of physics, in case of subtle anomalies in physical laws and such.
Further, it doesn't particularly change anything, I'm at least quite confident that consciousness is substrate-independent, in the sense that it doesn't matter if you're running the algorithms on meat or silicon. A Turing Machine is a Turing Machine, be it operated by an abacus or a supercomputer. Thus, unless I have concrete information on what the parameters or aims of the Simulation are, I choose to behave largely as I would in base reality.
We have pretty much zero information on if there's a warden operating the Simulation, what their goals and desires are. Assuming they care at all about our actions and aren't just watching how things play out with no desire to intervene. That makes attempts at appeasing them utterly useless in the face of Pascal's Wager.
Now, if the creators suddenly showed up and blazed the stars with fire to spell out "Yeah dog, that Jesus dude had a point" or "Minimize the rate of increase of entropy" or "Discover a means of FTL travel for the right to exit the Sim", then after due diligence, I think that's what our civilization will focus on. I don't find religious claims to be based in remotely enough evidence to count.
Given what we currently know, sure. But if we ever become capable of simulating consciousness, I'd argue we're much more likely inside a simulation than not.
Here we definitely disagree. All sorts of rules become much softer if we're in a simulation. The likelihood that at some point matter is created, or entropy decreases, or someone travels back in time, becomes much higher. Whatever rules we learn may change at a moment's notice. Last Thursday-ism becomes not just plausible, but imo just as likely as the alternative.
On a moral level there would also be implications. Solipsism would become much more popular and plausible. Anyone who thinks morality only matters in "real life" gets a free ticket to do whatever they want.
We have virtually limitless information. The nature of reality itself, and every little detail of it, provides us with clues. Understanding reality better is understanding the warden better. Surely the nature of the simulation matters to whatever entity set it up.
I am not a simulationist, nor do I believe God is literally all-powerful (in the sense that he invented the rules of reality), but the points I've made do apply to a sufficiently powerful God. Assuming God exists, you can look at how reality is built to determine his values. You can construct hypotheses, test them against reality itself, and thus determine how accurate your own idea of God is.
I don't find the idea of God compelling or attractive. I intuitively shy away from religion in general. It seems hokey and wrong. There are so many idiotic religious people, and even intelligent religious people seem to have decision-making processes that are totally bunk. They construct towering, highly technical edifices of logic (such as the first-mover argument) that seem totally worthless. Nevertheless, my own tests of God's nature have quite consistently supported a single conclusion, so I find myself forced to accept that conclusion, at least until sufficient contradictory evidence arises.
I agree on that front, but I don't think the degree of relaxation on our expectations is of a degree that you should change your typical behavior. Like hell yeah, invest trillions into doing our best to break physics and find loopholes, but for the average person, until that happens, you should live your life with the general expectation that things will remain as they are.
I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist who happens to only be beholden to my own sense of ethics, so I couldn't care less what they do at the basement level universe. I deny even the ability of a nigh omnipotent entity to dictate an objective code of ethics any more than they can square a circle or make pi equal 3 (without manipulating whether space is Euclidean or not).
Sure, I agree with that in principle, yet I notice the religious doing their best to explain away discrepancies between observed reality and the properties they ascribe to their deities when they conflict. You cannot reconcile an Omnibenevolent deity with ichthyosis vulgaris.
As far as I can tell, the universe looks indistinguishable from how it would be if it ran like clockwork without external intervention, and even if there was an intelligent creator, they're not doing anything more than initializing the starting values.
I genuinely pity you for this, with no intention of being condescending. You seem like an intelligent and sane person, so it makes it particularly perplexing to me, as opposed to someone who believes because that's what they're taught to do, rather than reasoning into it or being convinced by personal evidence.
Ask yourself what sin I've committed that the clear light of God has been denied to me, I'm not so crazy that if an angel descended from the heavens with a proof of P=NP from the heavens with the blaring of trumpets that I wouldn't significantly relax my confidence in my atheism.
Miracles seem thin on the ground now that we have omnipresent recording devices and the scientific method. Maybe they'll be deepfaked back into existence, but none have happened where I can see them.
About the only way I could be convinced otherwise is with seriously strong evidence, and even then it would have to be distinguishable from just being at the whims of a superintelligence, then again that's godlike enough that you don't need to invoke the supernatural. I am leery of doing psychedelics precisely because they occasionally make people spiritual or religious, I consider that a bug and not a feature, scrambling your neurotransmitters provides no more real insight than bombarding a stick of RAM with ionizing radiation till it segfaults to a BSOD.
Besides, I asked you what anyone with say, a practically infinite number of dollars to use for experiments, could use to convince you otherwise, and you denied that you'd be open to them even in theory. Your beliefs seem infalsifiable short of performing involuntary neurosurgery or finding a way to hack into your brain, and I don't consider that to be on the table even with my worst ideological enemies, because I'd rather they didn't do the same to me. I'd rather kill them or have them kill me, not that my antipathy to the religious extends to that extent unless they're a jihadist or the like.
It's a big world, and I prefer to live and let live, but if I find myself at the Pearly Gates I'm going to try and kick God in the nuts and damn the consequences for my immortal soul.
Sure, depending on the nature of the simulation. If it's just you being simulated then of course you become far more likely to be able to break the rules.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for an entity to be able to just define morality however it pleases. However, this doesn't necessarily imply morality is entirely subjective and up to the individual. My own view of morality is that it's like logic. We know that logic itself is inherently arbitrary and fundamentally relies upon axioms, and you can technically have a logic system which rejects all axioms but is equally "valid", but if you do so you simply will not get very far. I think it's pretty self-evident that reality itself obeys modus ponens and many of the other fundamentals of logic. In a void, any system of logic is valid, but in reality we at least understand which of the basics are actually valid and which are just worthless theory.
Similarly, I think morality in the end may have an infinite array of theoretically valid possible systems, but only one which is actually valid in reality, given axioms which reality itself presents to us. I suspect a sufficiently intelligent being could take base-level axioms of morality (maybe "suffering bad", "pleasure good", and "meaning good") and build them out using logic into a provably correct moral system. Any divergence from such a system would provably create a contradiction at some more base-level principle--for example, maybe you think lying is justified in X case, but this proves you must either value suffering or disvalue pleasure. It's still possible to do so--to accept a contradictory moral system, or reject a base axiom--but that denies base reality in the same way denying modus ponens does.
Our moral theories are much less advanced than our logical theories, so I can't offer much evidence for this belief, save that morality just doesn't feel subjective to me. There is something objectively beautiful about the movement of planets around their stars, the capacity for a single cell to grow into trillions working in harmony, and the delighted laughter of babies. An empty universe feels objectively worse than one where complex and beautiful phenomena arise. The only totally objective reasoning I can offer in support of this position is that consciousness, and experience, seem to be more than just atoms following their predefined courses, and possibly operate by different rules as well (such as the rule that "suffering bad").
We've talked about this before, but I don't think knowledge of God is particularly helpful to most people at present. The point of our current situation is to learn to be good, and while believing in God does grant some advantages towards that end (more confidence that things will turn out alright, easier to put aside worldly concerns, etc.) there are also drawbacks (easy to do good things for the reward rather than because they are the right things to do, easy to avoid bad deeds to avoid punishment rather than because they're the wrong things to do).
There's a very strong reason that religious people generally also do not claim to have seen angels, and I generally discount even the ones who do. Too much evidence before you're ready is harmful.
I realize this is possibly an insane cognitohazard. "God hides from those who aren't ready for him. No I'm not ready for him. Yes I believe in him anyways. Of course controlled randomized studies don't produce evidence for God; we're not ready for that kind of evidence, and that method of finding evidence proves it." All I can say in my own defense is:
At times when I am morally stronger, I see quite a lot more evidence of God, in ways which are quite difficult to discount as placebo or confirmation bias
The religion I follow seems very well-designed to encourage moral growth. Moral growth is important to me, so it's not like my efforts in the meantime (before I have seen sufficiently strong evidence of God's existence) are wasted. Also, this gives me a good built-in sanity check. If I ever get to a point where I'm very morally capable, but I still don't have more evidence, then that is proof to me that my beliefs were misguided if not entirely incorrect.
I simply know myself well enough to know that I don't currently want to be constrained by perfect knowledge that my belief system is true. I like playing videogames, wasting time with friends, overeating, and otherwise not living up to my own potential, even though in at least some of those cases I know that I will personally regret those actions very soon after indulging in them. These actions are only possible at all because I don't yet know for sure
If (and hopefully when) I purge these suboptimal desires, I expect to quickly gain undeniable evidence of God's existence. And one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, so that's my last resort for uncovering the truth.
The God I believe in is essentially a superintelligence anyways. I don't think magic or divine power exist separate from the laws of physics at all--if/when we learn them they will just be more laws of physics.
Agreed on psychedelics. They seem to make people spiritual in a very... suspect way, like they've just taken a hammer to whatever part of the brain handles skepticism and then latched onto the first idea that presented itself afterwards.
If it makes you feel better, I'd answer the same if someone were trying to convince me that my beliefs were correct, and did so when it mattered. I grew up in a religious household with very little exposure to contradictory ideas and still considered my family's belief system wrong and bad despite probably thousands of hours of close, trusted people trying to convince me otherwise. It may look to you like my beliefs are unfalsifiable, but really I just don't trust anyone else to evaluate the evidence for me. Statistics are helpful (it genuinely does give me some pause that RCT's don't support my beliefs) but in the end these beliefs can only be falsified, or confirmed, by me. It helps that nobody else seems even slightly capable of evaluating the question from an objective standpoint--everyone I know is either scientifically illiterate and generally unintelligent (most people I know IRL) or accepts things I currently consider self-evidently wrong (the belief that consciousness is nothing special, or that morality is subjective).
That's enough about me though. If you want to start gathering evidence, I'd suggest explicitly creating a model of the world without God, and one with God, and living for a day as if there's maybe a 1% chance the latter is the correct model. This might mean praying with real intent for 30 seconds and then noting the results, slightly modifying your system of ethics to do something virtuous you wouldn't normally consider worthwhile, or simply making an extra effort to be consistent about your own code of ethics. I guarantee the results will be positive and worth the effort.
This won't give you, as you say, "seriously strong evidence." I don't have that level of evidence myself. What I have is a path for investigating God's existence. The actual end of the path (where I know for sure) is a long ways away, but each step so far has gotten me closer to that end and made life much better besides. Take enough steps, note enough times that each step made under the assumption God is real has both made life better and provided a tiny piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion, and remaining on the path becomes the obvious course of action.
I appreciate the thoughtful answer, and I will apologize several months late for getting prissy with you in the last debate. From my perspective, you seemed to be intentionally obtuse, but in light of further interaction it was probably not intentional or just us unable to find a productive framework for discussion.
This assumes that things like privileging hypotheses that are compact in a computational sense and better describe available evidence is sensible for the purposes of navigating reality.
They are. That still doesn't remove the inherent subjectivity about caring about it!
That should be a blazing red flag the moment you bring worth into the picture! Taboo the term and its synonyms and I guarantee you'll flounder.
The fact that we both agree this is a good belief to have doesn't make it objective, nor does my further confidence that most intelligent entities capable of achieving their goals would agree too.
In other words ubiquity of a property in the set of entities likely to exist is not the same as objectivity. Nor does plain old utility.
I can see that you understand perfectly well that that the axioms themselves are arbitrary, and it confuses me that you don't take that to the logical conclusion here.
The Socratic Method never bottoms out, any more than you can manually count till infinity.
Some axioms are clearly better than others on metrics we care about, but they themselves do not determine said metrics after all. In maths the goal is to build the most complicated yet elegant edifice you can with as few axioms as you can get away with, because if an axiom turns out to be flawed in some manner, then you've just fucked everything over.
At most you can build a perfectly consistent model of morality, while Godel carefully watches and waits to jump your ass. It doesn't make it any more objective than simply stating that you believe because you believe. Nothing can.
Feelings are really not a good idea when it comes to navigating the world. The map must look at the territory from time to time, we can't sit in a dark room and develop an accurate idea of the world outside by going off vibes alone.
I am content in knowing my moral intuitions are inherently subjective, and that doesn't stop me from promoting them to others in the hopes they agree. I'm glad that's the case, because it simply can't be otherwise as far as I can see it.
A hole shaped like God as you metaphysically postulate can no more be filled than one requiring squares to have three sides. At most you can develop neurosurgery good enough to staple it shut.
This really looks unjustified to me, clear evidence that you're presuming the results of a thought experiment or hypothetical and then reasoning backwards to justify it.
The fact that I now believe you to be arguing in good faith makes this observation several orders of magnitude more confusing, and corrosive to my "soul" in the sense that it's almost Cosmic Horror that entities so similar to me in terms of intellect and origin can have such alien views. It's little consolation that I'm the moral mutant if you look at the set of all humans to exist, even if most of them would be utterly confused by why you had to resort to such complex arguments when as far as they were concerned, religion was true in the same mundane way we believe in gravity.
What exactly changed such that we lack the privilege to watch water turn to wine or the seas part? Are angels allergic to plates of silver salt or CCDs in digital cameras? It's not just that they ceased outright after Jesus was offed, miracles have been claimed to occur right until we can verify them.
The claim that we only deserve subtle theological arguments or personal revelations seems deeply silly when your religion abounds with the opposite, and it's more like the panicked justifications of a battered housewife claiming she deserved it rather than a convincing argument as far as I'm concerned.
If I ended up in such a scenario knowing what I know of biology and wider reality, I would put more stock in the notion I was going insane.
To get me to agree, find and replace objective with subjective.
You can't deny which side has the higher base rate and even includes their existence in their model of reality.
I am agnostic on the former, and everything I've said so far is an attempt to justify the latter, in good faith, not that I think you think that I'm not arguing from it.
God has plenty of baggage that a mundane Superintelligence as we can reasonably postulate would lack. Sure, from the perspective of their playthings, it makes little difference, but the gulf between being fuck off powerful and omnipotent is as large as that between 10^87 and infinity.
I am not sure I am even capable of doing the former any more than I can, at will, convince myself there's a 1% chance I'm hallucinating the sofa I'm sitting on. I think @FCfromSSC claims to be able to do things along those lines, but it's a power I lack.
I do a decent job of aligning to my own personal code of ethics, or at least there's nothing obvious I could do right now that I am not already trying to do, being bottlenecked more by my own ADHD and akrasia!
This is a fundamentally unsound approach in the same manner as convincing yourself you have an invisible bodyguard is. Sure, you might save time on your walk home by happily taking shortcuts through a deserted alley, and that might increase your overall QOL for a bit till you confidently refuse to hand over your wallet to a mugger.
Then you die, and don't get to find out much of anything at all because Heaven or Hell probably don't exist.
Given this all started as an argument about reconciling rationality with religion, I would claim this is an example of sacrificing epistemic rationality for instrumental rationality, it might even be a sensible tradeoff, but you pay the price eventually.
It's fine, I'm usually stuck in a superposition of 60% "my beliefs are correct" and 40% "my beliefs are utterly, hopelessly wrong" and my constant awareness of the latter possibility makes a lot of very dismissive behavior seem reasonable.
What I am trying to say is that logic is the map, and reality is the territory. The fact that logic cannot prove whether reality exists does not mean reality does not exist. If the map burns up, or omits an important detail, that won't actually affect reality. A better word choice than "worthless" would have been "inaccurate." Plenty of systems of logic are internally consistent, but only one actually describes reality.
From logic's perspective, sure, no system of logic is more valid than any other. From reality's perspective, only one system of logic is correct, and it is objectively correct.
And yes, I know this due to logic, so there's a chance I'm wrong, but causality flows from reality to logic, not the reverse.
This is why I compared morality to logic. Logic, and math, describe reality. It's not that some mathematical axioms are better than others because they lead to outcomes we prefer, it's that they are simply more accurate to reality. You could frame that as an outcome we prefer, I suppose, but that's somewhat misleading, because certain axioms would be more accurate to reality whether or not we're around to prefer them. 1+1 = 2 is primarily descriptive of the way things actually work, and what it describes remains true regardless of our preferences.
My belief is that morality works the same way. Suffering exists independent of our theories and beliefs about it. Thus, it's conceivable that morality exists too, as a descriptive and prescriptive map based on reality. Just like 1+1 = 2 in reality even if you choose axioms which state otherwise, suffering is objectively bad no matter your axioms.
An important caveat is that even if morality does objectively exist, and only a single moral system is objectively consistent (which is my assertion) that doesn't really fix the is/ought problem or obligate someone to value good above evil. So I'm not trying to say it's possible to prove that suffering is wrong, but I do think it's possible to collect all sorts of axioms like that into one objectively correct (i.e. accurate to reality and consistent) system and prove that rejecting one axiom means rejecting the whole system and morality in general.
That's fair. I don't want to start another tangent here; this discussion is already broad enough, but I have interacted with many people who believe in religion the same way you believe in gravity. They were generally uneducated, poor, extremely unintelligent people. I had a very hard time communicating even simple if-then statements with them. They take both religion and gravity on faith and I think that's much safer than asking them to apply skepticism to things their society says is true, haha.
Well, again, the theory I've expounded would pretty directly imply that angels are allergic to cameras, yeah. At least until they decide otherwise. If they visit someone then it's usually meant to be a visit just for that one person.
My own religion has always heavily emphasized personal revelation. This isn't exactly a new idea to Christianity though, it's contained in the Bible! Matthew 13:58 says that Jesus declined to perform many miracles in his homeland due to people's unbelief there. If miracles would have benefitted those people then Jesus would have performed them.
I don't think you would. The evidence I have in mind is generally along the lines of "I prayed for X and immediately got it, in a way highly unlikely to be coincidence." In the past I've gone so far as to list everything prayed for, things desired but not prayed for, expected probability of receiving each of those things, and expected time of arrival, then statistically analyzing the results. I didn't randomize which things were prayed for. I probably should have, but I got such strong results that continuing to test it felt ungrateful.
I only did that 2-3 times, but that meant that I had those times as frames of reference, which is how I know that when I'm more morally upright my prayers are way stronger.
I think many would see such behavior as insanity but not of the clinical sort, more of the "excessively neurotic" sort, which I think is appropriate given the nature of the question being investigated.
Sure, in fact I'd say that latter fact is the only one that matters. Of course if you believe strongly in something, you'll have more dreams (or "visions" which is what most angelic sightings are) about that thing, and attach more significance to them. You could describe that as a hallucination but I think it's more complex than that; healthy cognition involves some amount of seeing what you expect to see, because that's just how the brain works.
To be clear the idea wouldn't be to believe there's a 1% chance, but rather to act how you think you might if that were your belief, i.e. pretend there's a 1% chance. If you don't want to, that's fine, but I think everyone is capable of pretense; it's the only way to survive many social situations.
If I had reason to believe I had an invisible bodyguard, i would try and investigate, rather than being satisfied that there's a small chance of an invisible bodyguard following me around. Maybe I'd buy an infrared camera, or fly somewhere and watch for empty seats. The belief would merit further investigation. At some point, if I've seen him on the infrared, maybe I would take my chances in a mugging, but it would take a lot of evidence before then to convince me that that was the right course of action.
I think God's existence is worth investigating. If you think the chance he exists is small, then of course you shouldn't quit your job, sell your house, and donate everything to the church, but I think it does merit a small test, such as a randomized test of the efficacy of personal prayer, if only for curiosity's sake. Then if that result turns out positive, of course it doesn't mean much, but it does mean you should try a bigger and more powerful test. Once enough of these tests turn out positive, it's probably time to start taking the possibility a little more seriously, study it more, maybe find better testing methods than RCPs. This is the path I am describing.
My investigation has yielded evidence and also improved my life. You could describe this as instrumental rationality. I'm sure I'd be less excited to continue investigating if the evidence collection process did not also improve my life. Still, it's not "believe X because belief in X is beneficial." It's more, "I should be spending years investigating the truth of this anyways, because it's that important, but I'm just not that patient or determined. Thankfully I get paid for the investigation, which makes it much easier to keep going." I would never trade epistemic for instrumental rationality (at least at any reasonable exchange rate) but having both is best.
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Interesting. The serious religious intellectuals tend to argue that you can't have any sort of epistemic hygiene without a 'first mover' - or in other words that the modern scientific worldview is based on a contradiction given that the a priori assumption is that no belief is ultimately true, which is in itself an ultimate belief.
Anyway I get a bit confused by these super high order epistemological arguments, but that's the steelmanned version of the other side's argument as far as I can tell.
ETA: I guess this is what rehashing the internet atheist wars from the other side feels like... good lord.
There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.
Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.
Why do pragmatic arguments make you uncomfortable?
I think I muddle together various issues
the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.
fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.
Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.
Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.
But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.
My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.
I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.
tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.
Oh man, I can’t even read all this because it’s so close to my own previous issues. I found a way out by listening to my heart or body or soul or whatever you want to call it instead of my head. Over rationalizing will get you nowhere.
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Even if you wish to hold it as axiomatic that there's an Uncaused Cause or something responsible for the existence of the universe, there is no way near sufficient evidence to imbue it with the usual crap like Omnipotence, Omniscience or Omnibenevolence, or assume it cares at all what we do or is even capable of doing so.
If God as it's claimed to exist created the universe via a Big Bang, it's a more parsimonious claim to state that the Big Bang itself is capable of arising ex nihilo, pending a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that explains if multiverses and the like exist.
And looking at the state of the world, it's indistinguishable from a scenario where a Creator simply set the wheels in motion and fucked off forever. Hence I'm more than content to swing Newton's Flaming Laser Sword about till it hits something it can't cut.
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If Christianity works to heal your inner wounds, then maybe you can find some other way of healing your inner wounds that has Christianity's strengths at healing inner wounds without also having the issue that there is almost no rational reason to think that Christianity is true.
What if I think, like Carl Jung and many other mystics, that true spiritual wisdom has to contain paradox?
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I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, as someone who is a natural skeptic and also an Orthodox Christian. Consider this comment an IOU to get back to you with something of an essay in the near future.
@TheDag @KingOfTheBailey @coffee_enjoyer I, um, wrote a long thing. It's up as a top level post (...and a reply because I ran out of characters) now.
Thanks but I don't see it, and visiting your profile page shows a thread that's "deleted by user". The reply is still accessible from your profile. Misfiring automated tools?
I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.
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Look forward to reading (can’t see it just yet)
Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.
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I love it! I second @KingOfTheBailey. I would love to see more discussion of this type on the Motte. I think @coffee_enjoyer would be interested too.
ETA wait maybe it's a different coffee name. Idk.
Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.
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I would definitely be interested. The relationship between reason and religion is the most interesting question to me.
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Please make it a top-level effortpost.
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I have precisely the opposite problem. Basically an atheist with respect to a personal, interventionist God, but trying to incorporate some sort of progress-oriented spirituality in my life to mixed success. I’ve experimented with New Agey concepts like the Law of Attraction, but it’s difficult to fully embody them when I know they’re fundamentally psychological tricks without any metaphysical underpinning.
If I understand your troubles correctly, I would strongly recommend you checking out John Vervaeke. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto (by the way exactly as Jordan Peterson) and he developed very attractive philosophical framework, trying to combine cognitive science, ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhist teachings. He presents his ideas in the youtube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I was under huge impression of the consistency and orginality of his thoughts. The whole thing strongly verges on spirituality and he explicitly states that he is trying to develop a 'Religion of no religion'. Usually I consider such attempts to be doomed to failure, but this was interesting even for me, a devout Catholic. Considering his religious affiliation I would label him a modern-day atheist, though he calls himself a Buddhist (in one of the episodes he argues that he doesn't find eternal life to be a good idea).
Interesting, earlier this year I did watch some of his interview with Bernardo Kastrup, one of my favorite modern philosophers, on the Theories of Everything Podcast but it didn't particularly stick with me. The series you linked sounds interesting, I'll give it a shot. Though I'm generally skeptical that a search for meaning is necessary or desirable. But I am coming from a more Buddhist nihilist perspective meaning is mostly a cope for dissatisfaction caused by misdirected attention. I didn't realize Vervaeke himself is a Buddhist, so if he still makes the case for finding meaning I'm open to hearing it.
I will second that, his lectures as well as Jordan Peterson's actually helped lead me back to the Church.
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I fully understand that the Motte community evolved from the rationalist community, but I just don't believe that you can be a completely rational person. There's so much happening to you from the inside and from the outside and you have absolutely no clue about it, not knowing what just hit you or led you to this mood or another. I think that this whole project of rationality is too much too demand from a person. I'm perfectly fine being full of contradictions, conflicting temptations, being driven by vague emotions or ephemeral visions. I think this is more genuine and truthful way of being then trying to squeeze your whole personality in one huge framework of rationality.
No one convinced me better, and no one speaks about this view on being more eloquently and beautifully then Eric Lander, a mathematician standing behind the Human Genome Project and a practicing Jew. The link is here, please watch it, its only three minutes.
FYI I'm a Catholic.
Yudkowsky strongly suggested that the rat community describe themselves as Aspiring Rationalists.
Our baseline human physiology no more lets you be a perfect rationalist than you can emulate a TI-84 in your head, at most you can, with effort, emulate some of the properties where it's relevant to you.
At any rate, the perfect shouldn't allowed to become the enemy of the better, at least until it's a tangible option.
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