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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:

Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.

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.

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.

The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.

We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:

So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.

The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.

And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.

Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.

But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?

As the Dreaded Jim famously said:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

And:

If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.

If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.

Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.

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:

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.

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.

scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims."

Look I just want levels of evidence to match levels of claims.

If any belief system says “we have the power to meaningfully affect material reality” then let’s see the evidence.

For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works? Plenty of religions claim that one still today. Also the power of prayer to affect outcomes is very common.

Those are very testable propositions.

And yet.

Or, what exactly is a soul anyway? Not material, not energy, some strange third thing. Can’t quite measure it, but it’s definitely there because the scriptures tell us so.

How much of a given holy book is literal vs. figurative? How do we know? Who’s in charge anyway?

Not even the believers come to some strong consensus about the particulars of theology, let alone present sufficient evidence for an actual skeptic.

I’m not going to trust any ideology about “meaning and purpose” if it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out. We can sort out our emotional issues without resorting to what sounds good.

I’ve been a devout believer and was told we had the Truth and that it could obviously withstand scrutiny. But really it relied upon strong emotions, group ties and peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and just so stories to protect faith from scrutiny.

If there is some higher power, it ought to have higher standards than the religions I’ve seen.

What’s really funny is plenty of Christians will take the opposite line you have and claim credit for the Enlightenment. And plenty of us will call secular ideologies we don’t like—say communism and wokeism—political religions.

Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.

I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.

If faith healing actually worked it would be easy to prove. That you would shy away from it confirms the weakness of your position.

Some religious people will even say things like god won’t respond to tests or took back the holy relic because otherwise we wouldn’t need faith.

Whining about the replication crisis getting in the way of proving the Power of God is such a funny cope that is classic Motte.

If religion were so potent then heretics like me should be getting blown out of the water with evidence and/or burned by heavenly fire, like back in the biblical days.

Faith healing would only be easy to prove if it wasn't a miracle: as in, if it was a natural process that repeats itself given the necessary conditions. But nobody claims it's that: the claim is that God directly intervenes. Think about what would happen if you tried to test it: you watch as a faith healer prays to God to heal someone. If nothing happens the faith healer can always say that God chose not to heal her: and if she gets better, the skeptic can always say that she would have gotten better anyway! There are countless testimonies of miraculous healing out there. Even journal articles backed by medical evidence: but the skeptic can always say that something else must have caused it.

If God's interventions can be predicted to happen even slightly more often in some conditions than others, then we would be able to derive those conditions, isolate them, replicate them and see if there really is an intelligence behind those events that resists being tested. If it doesn't resist being tested, cool, more reliable miracle healings for us. One might wonder, of course, if perfectly predictable faith healings are "interventions", rather than being as much mundane facts of the world as things falling down.

If God intervenes completely randomly or in a way that's indistinguishable from being random, then we again run into the "why call it God" question.

The classic response here is “why does god hate amputees?”

“Miracle” is a red herring. Can an actual effect be observed even if the mechanism isn’t understood?

If a claimed effect can’t ever be separated out from other causes then it sounds made up.

“Testimonies” of a phenomenon are a starting point for investigation, not strong evidence by themselves. The paper you linked to is about one lady.

If the power of god via the laying on of hands or prayer is so unreliable that it can’t be distinguished from other causes then that’s normally something we would judge to be made up. Faith healers will go on TV and touch people but no one’s showing studies over time where say, inexplicably, those people have a 35% better chance of outcomes relative to average. Or say Christian hospitals consistently outperforming secular ones. Or Muslim surgeons outperforming secular ones.

Robust studies showing consistent effects would signal there was something going on, even if we couldn’t directly detect the mechanism.

If the power was real and as effective as adherents claim the evidence would not be so shy about being observed. Biblically, the power of god gets demonstrated quite strongly but we can’t seem to get that to happen nowadays. The simplest explanation consistent with human behavior and the laws of physics is that it was just made up.

“I do a wishful thinking and sometimes magic happens that can’t be measured/observed by others” is not a strong approach to reality regardless of whether it’s associated with religion or not.

The user above you cited a specific “miracle,” restoration of eyesight, and you cited a lack of a different category of miracle, regrowth of a removed limb. You wouldn’t claim Viagra doesn’t work because boners could have other causes but it doesn’t make bald people grow hair.

Even disregarding the categorical error, there’s another point to be made. Instead of claiming your null result negates and dismisses the documentation of a positive result as a single anecdote instead of data, come up with a different falsifiable hypothesis rather than jumping to the null hypothesis. If there is a fully material way to restore macular degeneration, the world needs to know it to relieve much suffering.

It seems that in the cited restoration of sight, the person knew they were being prayed for. We also know that yogis can perform incredible feats of biofeedback manipulation through meditative states and/or self-hypnosis. The accounts of Jesus at least once have Him saying, “Go, your faith has healed you.” Perhaps there is a method of hypnosis which can cure certain types of blindness. Come up with an experiment to falsify that hypothesis, changing no factors from the cited anecdote.

It’s not a categorical error to:

  1. Point out the claimed miracle is n=1 from decades ago.
  2. Being up the lack of miracle healing of lost limbs, because it’s telling. BS tends to hide where ambiguity gives it natural cover. There’s lots of ambiguity in health outcomes, but lost limbs are a clear cut (pun intended) situation, so nobody can play games there.

The null hypothesis is that lots of health outcomes happen for reasons we don’t understand the murky details of, because the human body is simultaneously wondrous and a dumpster fire, and there’s no reason to go claiming miracles from god when a positive outcome happens. That’s just picking hits and ignoring misses.

If faith healing happened commonly, as many claim it does, then there ought to be a way to show that systematically. Not one offs.

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