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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.
But can you really justify your belief in truth when it comes to our social purpose in life, our social feeling in the world, our emotional health and our deepest evolutionary nature?
I sense that you are a “truth terminalist”: you believe that truth is our terminal value. It’s easy to come to this view because of the vast utilitarian benefit of truth. When we use truth instrumentally, we can make life easier and more pleasant: better food, less disease, better mental health treatment, etc. But the instrumental use of truth is not truth valued unto itself. In fact there are wildly different terminal values at root here.
Truth valued unto itself would mean that it’s as good an idea to teach a toddler about the horrors of rabies infections and typhus, as it is to teach a toddler to be loved. Truth valued unto itself would mean that a life where everyone memorizes facts despite deep emotional anguish is better than a life with less trivia but perfect emotional health. Truth valued unto itself means that suicide and murder can be done without guilt, because humans no longer have any rational reason to listen to the voice in their head that has hitherto introduced guilt. “There is no rational reason not to murder, only a social-evolutionary reason that I can ignore if I really desire to,” says the truth terminalist. Truth terminalism means that we should sacrifice untold human life if it means the acquisition of a single factoid. It would mean that the scientist who counts blades of grass repeatedly is as valuable as the scientist finding a cure for cancer.
Truth terminalism is, in actual fact, not really subscribed by any living being on earth. Instead, they subscribe to some shade of “pleasure/good terminalism” in either a stoic or epicurean or ontological sense. Now if what I’ve written is true, this means you actually need a utilitarian reason based on the good/pleasant to justify your lack of participation in non-factual social movements which produce preferable emotional states and communities. “It’s not true” is not a rational justification here.
(An ancillary argument: religions create in the heart of the adherent a practical knowledge of love, devotion, and community. This knowledge is true in the sense that there are actually true social facts being collected. In what way is this information less true than the movement of the stars? Some angelic being observing earth would see no difference in truth value between social information and the movement of the stars.)
I think you are abusing "rationalist" here. I do not consider myself a pure rationalist in the way this forum usually uses the term. I do, however, try to use rational reasoning, and while I wouldn't consider myself a "truth terminalist" exactly, I do consider truth to be a higher value than, say, pleasure or comfort. Of course that does not, as you imply, mean going around like some autistic robot spouting random true-but-horrible facts at random children.
So I find your argument that people who place a higher value on truth than whatever your justification is for accepting religion to be valuing truth only for its utilitarian value weak. And even if you could prove I am merely utilitarian in valuing truth, it still gives me no reason to believe in things I have no reason to believe in except they would make me feel better.
But why not? If truth is indeed a higher value than comfort, or equanimity, or peace of mind, or any other potential terminus, then it would be more important that we fill every animal with facts rather than wellbeing. That would be for their greater good, because knowledge of truth is the greatest good. We would desire to raise non-functioning children who play a very mean game of jeopardy, even if they have poor wellbeing.
This is kind of circular in the way it is phrased. If a belief is conducive to greater personal and social happiness, and if our terminus value is something like “greatest happiness and human flourishment”, then it intuitively makes sense that we believe the thing which maximizes our most important value. There would be no reason to cling to non-beneficial truth, because we already established that goodness is a superseding value over truth and truth is merely instrumental to goodness. The “reason” for a happiness-optimizing belief is that it optimizes happiness. There is no “reason” to believe something that is true-but-useless, as it doesn’t bring us closer to what is most important.
Valuing truth more than comfort or equanimity does not mean that its value is infinite relative to comfort or equanimity. Nor does it mean "filling every animal with facts rather than wellbeing."
I do not believe that you are in good faith failing to understand this. I think you think that playing "gotcha" with ridiculous straw men is some sort of winning debate move.
Maybe you can simply choose to believe whatever is most instrumentally beneficial to you, but I can't.
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