This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
And:
The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:
tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.
What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.
Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.
All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.
Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.
Okay, but let's say I agree that meaning is "important" to human beings and necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
It does not follow that religion, any religion, is true. It just means that religious belief might make people happier.
This is not dissimilar to the argument some people have made here, that religion is good for society and therefore we should promote it regardless of whether it's true. We'd be better off if everyone was Christian, so go to church even if you don't actually believe in God.
That might work for some people, but it would not work for me. I won't claim I couldn't or wouldn't pretend if my life or livelihood depended on it, but otherwise, I just don't believe in God, I don't believe in supernatural or metaphysical explanations for anything, and therefore I am not going to subscribe to your newsletter (metaphorically speaking).
Will humanity be sadder and find less meaning if religion goes away? Maybe so! But your argument still looks a lot like "Therefore we should all pretend to believe even if we don't, because we'll be better off that way."
I think the most compelling and scariest element of H.P. Lovecraft's supernatural yet profoundly atheistic mythos was not the unspeakable Elder Gods (who were not really "gods"), but that the underlying theme of all his works was that humans are an accident and the universe fundamentally does not care about us. We have no higher purpose or meaning, and if we all got wiped out in an asteroid strike tomorrow, no one would notice or care.
This is (minus the Elder Gods) basically what I believe. And I acknowledge that for some people, that can seem pretty scary and nihilistic. For me, it just is, and I find plenty of meaning in my life while acknowledging that I'm just an infinitesimal blip in the here and now. Sure, it would be nice to believe there is an omnipotent deity who loves each one of us individually and promises an eternal afterlife, but I can't force myself to believe this because it would be nice. Maybe instrumentally we should try to convince the proles to believe this, but to me, that seems awfully cynical and more likely to just end up in the same bad place religion often does.
I agree it doesn't follow that a religion is true, necessarily. However my main claim is not that meaning is important, but that materialism is ultimately false. You haven't addressed that here.
Perhaps I haven't fleshed out my argument enough, but my stance is in fact quite dissimilar from that argument. I do believe in God, and supernatural beings such as angels and demons. I think the whole 'psychological' argument from pro-religion types, while pointing to important considerations, is sadly quite flawed and does lead to self delusion.
However a related argument, the one that convinced me, is learning to trust experiential evidence or knowledge. Due to our upbringing in Enlightenment rationalism, we are trained to only trust a sort of consensus, 'objective' view. Or in other words we've learned to distrust and disbelieve any of our own experiential, or dare I say empirical, qualia in favor of only believing things that can be confirmed via repeated scientific experiments, or the consensus making machines of our society.
My point is that this 'objective' reality is, once truly dug into, false. The scientific materialist worldview is full of misconceptions and outright lies.
To put forth a bit more of an argument in favor of the supernatural, I'll quote from this article on angels and demons which, while a bit out there, makes an excellent point here:
Anyway, hope this clarifies things a bit. And I genuinely am happy you seem to be able to live with and find meaning in a nihilistic framework. I don't doubt that some, or even many people, can. That still doesn't mean that framework is true.
Scientific materialism is dominant because even the religious use it instrumentally to figure things out.
You could prove materialism false with one good demon.
“Not reproducible on demand” ah well so it’s not quite like a lion I can go observe in 30 minutes at the local zoo if I wanted to is it?
It’s more like Sagan’s garage dragon I guess. So real, so very hard to detect. Very reproducible, but very shy about observation.
Well no, not quite like a lion. They are beings of spirit, fundamentally different from us physical beings. And by many accounts much older and wilier.
Besides, there are plenty of people who have personal evidence of demons active in their lives. There are plenty of recordings of ghosts and strange phenomenon if yo know where to look. Again, the point is that scientific evidence requires reproducibility on demand.
Not actually true. We study things we are not able to reproduce all the time. Scientific experiments should be reproducible, but science is not only limited to experiments. Observational science and experimental science are both subsets of science and both can produce scientific evidence.
If astrophysicists detect some kind of pulse from deep space, that is evidence of some kind of phenomenon even if we can't reproduce it. They may look for other such incidences and may keep looking where it came from to see if it happens again, and certainly that will help gather information, but the initial incident and whatever recordings and so on were taken is still scientific evidence. It might not be enough to work out what caused it, but that isn't the same thing.
Recordings of ghosts are scientific evidence, for example. But just like with the pulse from deep space, one of the things the recording might be evidence for is equipment malfunction, or a hoax, or a poorly built camera or antenna, or yes, actual ghosts, or space aliens. That's why you then study the various proposed theories and try to gather more evidence (which does not have to be the same type of evidence), to discard or strengthen theories.
Even once we had a full understanding of ghosts, or black holes then we might be able to reproduce them, using some kind of technology but it certainly isn't a requirement. The power demands to reproduce a black hole might simply be too much for humanity to ever manage, even if we understood the mechanism 100% perfectly.
Reproducible experimental evidence is strong, because it shows that something works the same way under the same conditions, and then you can alter the conditions and see what changes, which gives you more accessible information, but it certainly isn't a requirement for science itself.
What you're missing is that observations are weak scientific evidence and have to be weighed. If you look outside and see the sun, and everyone else in your town can do the same, then even though blind people cannot see the sun, that is good evidence the sun exists as an observable entity. But if 99.99999% of people looked up and did not see the sun, then the observational evidence of the remaining tiny percentage has to be weighed against that. Is it a hallucination? Are they lying? Is it that they are mutants who can see a wavelength of light everyone else cannot? The fact that most people do not see the sun is ALSO scientific evidence.
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
Sure, sure. Conceded.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link