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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.

Pretty sure I agree with you. May I request a reading list / articles / blogs that have helped you form this.

After some thought I wrote down a clearer explication of what I meant by "Enlightenment epistemology", and what I see as the problem with it. Here goes...

The motto of the Enlightenment, as famously put by Kant, is Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! (Have the courage to use your own understanding) [Kant (1784): What is enlightenment]. To elaborate a bit, this means

  • Exclusively honoring of the rules of evidence used in the physical sciences -- as opposed to other modes of persuasion including intuition, pathos, authority, and tradition, especially religious tradition.
  • For Kant, and for contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker, this is not a balancing act, but wholesale abolition of the alternatives to make way for what they call "Reason". Kant writes that "Laziness and cowardice" are the only reasons men do not free themselves from the yoke of authority and tradition [ibid]. Pinker lists intuition, tradition, authority, and sacred texts as "Ways of going wrong" [source]. According to this view, which I call Enlightenmentism, there is no rightful place for any other mode of rhetoric, besides that used in the sciences, in the discussion of public policy and moral norms.

What's not to like?

  • The problem is not that scientific knowledge and scientific evidence are "bad". On the contrary, the body of knowledge we have acquired by those methods are a blessing to humanity, and I think we could not have acquired it any other way. Moreover, the rules of evidence in the physical sciences, before wokeness started taking academia by the throat at least, were what I think they ought to be. When scientific evidence decidedly favors one answer to a question of fact, that evidence should be what settles the question.
  • The problem is that this sort of reasoning, by itself, doesn't get you very far outside the subject matter of the academic sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, etc.). In particular, by itself, it gets you nowhere in ethics or policymaking. People who believe that it does, or even that it ought to, are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains.
  • Contrary to the claims of thinkers such as Jeremy Benthem, John Stuart Mill, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris, humanism (viz., the position that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings, perhaps along with other sentient creatures) does not close the "is-ought" gap in any useful way. Again, people who believe it does are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains, and why their conclusions differ from those of other people. (I have argued this at some length in another post).
  • The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral norms and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, then the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and the "Enlightenment" views of thinkers like Kant, Mill, Pinker, and Harris only pour fuel on the fire.

I appreciate the effort comment. This is not only succinct (which can be hard when dealing with the very abstract ideas of very abstract ideas), but also avoids knee-jerk reactionary perspectives.

I've been a skeptic of what you might call "full abandonment enlightenment" thinking. Knowledge traditions are self-evidently important. But a lot of the anti-enlightenment (enlightenment skeptic, whatever you prefer) writing that I see does a poor job of arguing beyond, "Science is cool or whatever, but the only thing that matters is divinely revealed moral truth." I think both are important (and actually complements). Your post does an excellent job of illustrating that model. Thank you.

I think both are important (and actually complements).

Agreed. Even Abraham argued with the revealed word of God, interpreting it in the light of reason [Genesis 18]. But when God's command was clear, nothing mattered more [Genesis 22].

Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes

  • "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
  • A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
  • Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
  • this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
  • Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
  • Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
  • William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.

Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that

  1. Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
  2. All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
  3. As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
  4. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
  5. Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
  6. The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.

I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:

  1. Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
  2. People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
  3. None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
  4. We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
  5. The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
  6. Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).

Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:

Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).

More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.

From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):

There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.

The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.

Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Absolutely not.

It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.

The Jacobins are the most central example of Enlightenment ideology possible. Bolsheviks are the grandchildren of the Jacobins, and the Nazis are close cousins, both being founded on hard Materialism and totalizing authoritarianism which founds its credibility on Enlightenment assumptions.

Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.

But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.

From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?

Let me say more succinctly what I think is wrong with Enlightenment worldview: It asserts that there are right ways to reason about propositions of fact (viz., generally speaking, the methods used in science and mathematics), but also holds that this "way" is the only honored method of assessing merit of any kind. On the other hand, it yields no actual basis for actually adjudicating between different worldviews (or, what Thomas Sowell called visions), and, in particular, between different value systems. The latter is a controversial assertion, but I believe it firmly and I think the attempts to argue against it (e.g., Harris's The Moral Landscape and Pinker's Enlightenment Now) are terribly weak, as I argued in this post.

This particular aspect of Enlightenment worldview -- and the aesthetic and moral nihilism that it actually entails (even when its adherents claim otherwise) -- had its seeds in the period we call the Enlightenment, but has grown to dominate Western thought only in the second half of the twentieth century, accelerating (in my opinion) when the right abdicated conservatism and embraced Fusionism. This aspect of "Enlightenment" yields tendencies toward radical progressivism and moral and aesthetic relativism, which are antithetical to the Anglo-Christian tradition and indeed to all viable traditions. The part of the Enlightenment that applied scientific materialism and objective reason to science was an improvement consistent with, and emergent from, the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, the aesthetic and moral nihilism that come from applying that view "outside of its lane" are a dragon eating at the roots of the tree of our civilization. Yes, they have always been around in some form, but they were poison to our ancestors, and they are poison now. By analogy, if my grandfather was an alcoholic, I can carry on the tradition of his identity values without embracing that particular tradition which was always detrimental to the whole.

I withdraw the claim about Pinker generally; he writes like a scientist because he is a scientist -- though the percentage in his popular books is still no more than half (and Better Angels of our Nature is probably a data-heavy outlier), which leaves 50% sermonizing.

For The Moral Landscape, I submit that the paragraph you chose is cherry-picked from the 1%. Here is a link to the full text of The Moral Landscape. What do you think the percentage is there?

Have you read any of Alasdair MacIntyre?

I'm particularly reminded of his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. I haven't read all of it, but the point you highlighted about different visions of morality and rationality coheres rather nicely with what I understand to be his views.

Truth, in the sense of material factuality is indeed sacred, but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism.

I can't put my finger on it, but this just seems wrong somehow. It feels to me like moral uprightness and artistic beauty are sacred because they cohere with truth -- not necessarily bare "material factuality" but "reality as it really is," "existence as it really is," "humans as they really are." The strongest claims for moral uprightness are always undergirded by an appeal to things being in line with what they really are. It was decidedly not the enlightenment thinkers who synthesized the concept of natural law, nor was it them who developed a teleological approach to ethics.

I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.

I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:

  1. The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
  2. "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).

In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.

In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone".

Or perhaps more to the point, "taking the lowly position of this child". That's a bit archaic, though; the translation into 4chanese is "being autistically honest" (having to couch communications in layers of defense is something neither children nor the autistic have the ability or the desire to do; that's why doing this is a mark of immaturity), and in Mottese it's "communicating using purely mistake theory" (paraphrasing how you described #2 above).

Which is why that part of Enlightenment philosophy is that way, why it works as well as it does (inb4 "surprise, schools of thought closer to God's global maximum make the people who accept that as the room temperature prosper, even though a local maximum of corruption may dominate them for a time"), and as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything.

There's a love in it. I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying Science truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love; the entire point of valuing truthfulness is to serve others, and permit/enable others to do the same, because that is (as far as I can tell) what God intends you to use His creation for.

as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).

I can't tell what you are trying to say, or how it relates to what you are responding to. Can you elaborate and/or clarify?

I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying [struck through: Science] truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love;

My position is not that we should deny truth, but that the Enlightenment overreaches on the exclusive sanctity of factual truth and objective methods for determining it. In particular, this leaves no honored way of adjudicating questions of morality or beauty, or of promulgating values and visions (that is, visions in the sense of Sowell's A Conflict of Visions).

By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The English word for this is 'honesty'.

I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.

Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.

Aletheia also just means 'truth'.

People have been doing translation and Biblical criticism for some time now.

I'd be hesitant about the use of etymologies there. That's just the normal Greek word for truth. Sure, that's the etymology, but it's been used like that for centuries; surely most of the sense of the etymological sense has been flattened out by that point.

That said, I don't have a well-defined way to read that middle term in that passage, so ignore me.

What I am citing isn't an etymology (that is, word history); it is the literal meaning of the word in Greek, that long existed, and continues to exist, contemporaneously with the meanings of its constituents (a-lethia: non-forgetting, non-concealment). It is translated as "truth" only because there is not a better English word to translate it into, but a lot of important content and connotation is lost in that translation. A word can become an idiom (that is, cease to have its literal meaning) over time, especially if the constituents become obsolete, but this was not the case with aletheia in Classical Greece, and I doubt it is even the case in Modern Greek. The root lethes, is still a word in Greek to this day, meaning "forgetting" or "oblivion" (not "materially false"). The English word "True" has no root in English, of which it is the opposite, but its opposite is "false".

In its earliest and most influential uses (Homer, for example), aletheia is used differently from the modern English word "true". Here is a brief discussion of how word aletheia is used in Homer. After Homer, the biggest influence on Classical Greek use of the word is probably the poem Aletheia by Parmenides, in which it has a broad and mystical meaning -- even farther from the modern notion of truth as material factuality -- perhaps akin to the Stoical notion of logos.

I also think that even if the word becomes idiomatic over time, it loses its literal meaning only by a matter of degree, and that these things affect us more than most people think.

I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.

While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.

Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.

Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?

My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.

This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.

  • -17

If it's any consolation to you, I had already seen your post on religious "gish gallops" but didn't think much of it. As soon as I had noticed Nelson's long post (and I admit I did recognize his name) and the long reply, and skimming the posts showed certain words, I immediately thought, "hey this is like one of those religious posts that guy was talking about."

(Personally I think I got bored of the CW thread because all that's been said has been said, to a first approximation)

Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.

I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.

Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:

  1. Pascal's wager seems to require that we give up everything to avoid infinite harms and seek infinite goods, if we are to do what is in our own interest. That is, it is instrumentally rational to do so.
  2. It's hard to get infinites accessible to you assuming that atheistic, supernatural-free, no-other-big-surprises model of the world is right.
  3. So you're best off if you bet everything on that being wrong, regardless of how unlikely you think it is.
  4. We need some way to know what's beneficial with regard to infinites, if we are to act.
  5. We don't have any more likely way to know things about infinite rewards accessible to humans than through purported supernatural revelation.
  6. Religions are the most likely sources of revelation of that variety.
  7. Large religions are more likely to be an authentic divine revelation, if God has an interest in giving humans knowledge (which, given that we're assuming divine revelation already, is probably fairly likely). So large religions are the most likely.
  8. Abrahamic religions are the only large religions offering infinite rewards, or escape from infinite torment.
  9. Judaism, in its prescriptions for gentiles, requires fairly little, so you get that one nearly for free, so the main consideration is Christianity vs. Islam. At least, if the rabbis got that right.
  10. And then, Christianity is more likely, as it seems more likely likely to be genuinely new revelation (e.g. attestation of a resurrection from the dead by 500 witnesses seems kind of new) whereas Islam seems to be cribbing off of and trusting Christianity, and grants that Jesus is a prophet, so then, if you were Muslim, you'd have to justify, why Christianity is actually false when the Quran seems to say it's not.
  11. You should be a Christian, if you want what's best for you.

Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.

I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.

A list of steps I disagree with (edit: fixed list formatting):

1. There's probably millions of words on Less Wrong about dealing with Pascal's wager, because precisely formulating a consistent decision theory that deals with it is is extremely difficult. At yet every human manages to operate under one - as AhhhTheFrench's examples show, everyone is already rejecting infinitely many such wagers at every point in their lives. The big problem for your argument is that most of these difficulties don't really require infinities, basically every stupid gotcha works about the same with just extremely big rewards for extremely low probabilities. You're also not giving him money if he promises he's invented life extension technology that will allow you and your family billions of years of happy (and fully-christian-compliant for all you afterlife worries) life. One rejects that offer by the same internal mechanism as the infinite version. But your steps 2.-4. rely precisely on the infinite.

5. Technically true in that there's no reason to think any way is likely, but this doesn't lead into the following steps.

6. This isn't even an argument, just a baseless assertion. If I had to pick one I'd say hallucinogens have stronger standing than religion here, but I don't actually have to pick.

7.1. You smuggled in some christian assumptions in the formulation in this statement - many religions involve a multitude of supernatural forces with differing agendas and power levels. Large religions could be such because they are led by evil forces or whatever.

7.2. Even assuming monotheism, that may be how a reasonable god would operate, but so much evidence from our world shows that, were there a god, it would be very far from a reasonable one.

8. Straightforwardly false. Especially when you nicely worded it to include nirvana.

9. If you're going for appeasing multiple religions at once, there's an infinity to choose from, so why stop at judaism and christianity?

10. As others have already mentioned, this one is very weak if you haven't already bought into a christian worldview.

1. The problem of handling many wagers virtually goes away once you accept one: the infinites involved in pursuing that one more or less perfectly are free to outweigh the others. It's actually pretty simple to make a decision theory that accepts it. Including hyperreals, and then doing the usual shut-up-and-multiply, works. LessWrong has written at length because they have no good way to reject the wager—I don't know that there's any real consistent way to do so—and so they just try to reject it while changing nothing else, which is just inconsistent. At least, so far as I have seen; I haven't looked in a while. (Especially funny in light of the EA shift somewhat in favor of longtermism: you know what else cares a lot about things with low chances of effective changes but extremely high rewards? This, but more.)

5. Doesn't it lead into them?

6. Fair enough. I mean, I do think you should pick, but if you think hallucinogens are more likely, then that would be the right move.

7.1. Then judge accordingly. In any case, if they're large because they're more powerful, wouldn't the more powerful be more likely to win in whatever cosmic battles we're talking about? Maybe you should worried that they might be evil forces, but if they're going to win, that doesn't sound good for anyone, not just their devotees.

7.2. Maybe that's how a reasonable god would act, and we shouldn't necessarily expect that, but we should make the best guess we can, and I don't exactly have a better one to offer.

8. Fair enough. Nirvana is cessation from suffering through infinite lives, right? Well, if those lives are finite in suffering each, and there are an ℵ0 number of lives to live through, well, there are larger infinities that could be promised by the other religions. (Yes, I didn't want to mention this messiness before, but there's no reason it wouldn't be present. It's unclear how they relate to each other, but most religions do not put an upper bound on how good their benefit/how harmful their cost, unlike what I just characterized nirvana as.)

9. Because large religions are more likely, assuming 7 is right. Combine that with prohibitions in said large religions on worshipping other gods, and so you shouldn't seek out more. (I gave Judaism a pass on that, because there are at least arguments to be made that Abrahamic religions worship the same God.)

10. Sure, this point is currently weak.

Edit: This doesn't matter, but I'm not currently convinced that by billions you've reached the point that the increase in benefit outweighs the decrease in probability enough to make it worth it. But at some point that does start happening, so, as I said, this point doesn't matter.

can you escape the list autoformatting?

3\. X

→

3. X

Step 1 seems very shaky to me, as it assumes the reward-structure of real, Earth theologies. These gods are likely to involve something like "Infinite reward for belief; Infinite punishment for disbelief."

If we assume God operates on the opposite payout, then Pascal's Wager clearly implies we need to be Atheist!

Then your problem isn't with assuming that the things that everything should be done are infinites, in what you just said, you seem to concede that. It's with step 5, maybe, as you think we can't know anything.

Alright, so now, what are you going to do?

It seems fairly unlikely to me that those people claiming divine revelation and eternal rewards would do precisely nothing to affect the probabilities involved, and, if you have no competition in mind that gives you a more likely source of infinite gain/loss, then you should go wholeheartedly after that small chance.

That is, God could have the opposite payout, but revelation, in my opinion, makes it slightly more likely that he has the policies conveyed than that he has the opposite, and any slight likeliness will dominate over the rest of your options. But it would be weird if they cancelled out exactly to zero, so if you really think the other way is more compelling, then you should act fanatically that way. If you're really not sure, well, this is literally the most important thing, so you should think extremely hard, like, lifetime of effort hard, in order to discern any minute difference in probability, so that you can figure out what to orient yourself around. Under no circumstances should you be ignoring all this.

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Regarding 10, if you go back far enough Islam is seen as a schism from Christianity by some writers. Notably Dante has Muhammad being tormented in hell as a schismatic, not as a pagan/non-Christian/whatever.

My impression was that it was more common to characterize it as heresy than schism, but yes, it was usual to see it as a departure from Christianity rather than another pagan religion.

Couldn't you argue that large religions that revise existing religions are less to be false, because God would not tolerate such mass heresy, and so Islam is more likely to be true than Christianity?

To be a Christian, you have to think that (a) Muhammad was a false prophet, (b) Muhammad was massively successful, and (c) God let Muhammad live a long and successful life (vastly more successful in his lifetime, as a prophet, than Jesus) knowing that it would lead to a mass heresy, and then tolerated Islam becoming a massively successful religion. Whereas, in Islam, Christianity is one of the revelations of true Islam that was corrupted due to human imperfection: Jesus was essentially a Muslim prophet, but - like all those prior to Muhammad - unsuccessful in delivering the true revelation, with his followers adding false elements e.g. that Jesus was not just the Son of Man, but the Son of God; not the blood descendent of David through Joseph, but the Son of God (and also God).

You might say, "Ah, but God doesn't intervene in such cases, at least not post-X AD, when he cut back on the smiting and miracle business, whereas before he might turn you into a pillar of salt if you looked back towards a sinful city" but then it seems you should also give up Premise 7.

And Muslims don't deny all of Christianity (e.g. that there is one God) just things like the Trinity, which are hardly the most attractive parts: even if you're willing to tolerate the mystery of the Trinity, it's hardly the first thing you'd bring up if you were trying to convince someone of Christianity. You'd want them to at least believe that God the Father exists, that Jesus was his son, that Jesus rose from the dead having sacrificed himself for our sins, and THEN, once the person is on board and emotionally invested and convinced they must be a Christian to be saved, say "And Jesus is also God, in a sense that I cannot explain to you and is a wonderful, beautiful mystery."

On the assumption of an activist God, who sometimes (but not always) intervenes to promote religions, Islam seems more plausible than Christianity.

I don't understand Pascal's wager arguments.

I can just as easily claim that there is an invisible being in my garage that will torment you upon your death for all time if you don't believe in it, and grant you an eternal afterlife of bliss if you do. That wouldn't cause you to believe in it on the off chance I am telling the truth, would it? What about if I claim to have that power and if you don't pay me 1,000 dollars each month as an indulgence I'll damn you to hell, and if you do I'll make sure you get to the good place? Isn't 1,000 dollars cheap insurance against an eternity of suffering or missing out on bliss for all time?

I'm making that claim! I'll be waiting for my venmo transfer when you're ready.

Alternatively, suppose there is a god who only accepts atheists into heaven, and all of the religions in the world are tests created by it to sort out the overly credulous. There are infinite religions you can create, including ones where atheists are the only ones who go to heaven.

Okay, sure, those are all possible.

But are they more likely? Once we've gotten to the step of "ok, we should care about infinites" there's not really any going back. The game is no longer about feeling a little happier today, or satisfied in a few decades, or getting the next promotion. It's no longer a matter of mere life and death. Now the concern, the only concern, is about pursuit of those infinite goods, and flight from the infinite bads.

You ask, how should we know? How may we judge some more likely than others?

Well, you may find it hard. Fair enough. But that doesn't change that that is fundamentally what things are about, what matters.

So: is it possible that there's a god that rewards atheists with heaven, and punishes the religious? Sure. But is there reason to think that that's more likely than the reverse? I don't see any reason to. But if that is the most likely source of infinites, then sure, maximize around that, and flee religion like your life depends on it (or, well, do the most to forget about the whole thing). But do you actually have any reason to think that that is the case? Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward.

So, do you think that that's more likely, or only that it's possible?

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What exactly have you contributed to the discussion here?

We have Nazis and Holocaust Deniers and white nationalists and pedophiles and Repeal the 19th (and the 13th and 14th...) party members here, and people who really really fucking do not like them manage to refrain from posting "You suck and your arguments are bad" every time they post.

So far, this is not the "mind-blowing" politeness you promised, and this is about your last warning because I'm sick of seeing these low-effort potshots in the queue just because you can't control yourself.

Come on, it's bad form to use me for every single example.

You see every post of mine in the queue as do all the other mods, due to low vote count, I think this leads to a focus that otherwise wouldn't fall on me. I thought that was an accurate assessment of that post, especially since the author couldn't see my post. But again, I will dial it down much further.

First of all, that's not actually true. I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, but not all your posts are automatically filtered, just a lot of them.

Second, we mostly see your posts a lot because you get reported a lot. You know what most people who get reported a lot have in common? They post a lot of really shitty comments. We try hard not to let the mob silence someone for having an unpopular point of view, but this isn't happening to you. You are not posting a fringe or minority view. Most people here are in fact somewhere on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, and you're annoying them too.

The best way to "dial it down" would be to stop seeing red every time someone says something about God or the Enlightenment.

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I'll accept a ban for this if need be, but this type of comment from this specific user is getting really old. It's near-constant, disdainful, antagonistic, and never changes, and never gets punished. We get that you don't like religious people, but nothing in your above characterization is remotely reasonable, fair, or calculated to lead to any useful discussion of the topic.

Bro, he just got warned for it. Wait a minute before firing off comments like that. Yes it's annoying to see /r/atheism comments from 2010 getting posted like it's insightful or groundbreaking or solving a major problem with our community(the motte is supermajority atheist or at least agnostic, tradcaths are overrepresented but still single digits). But there are people whose actual job is to tell him to knock off the smug one liners and complaining about the <20% who are religious believers of any sort. We should let them do it before posting even more complaining.

The author can't even see my comment. They blocked me months ago. What would eating a ban with a user name "TheThrowaway" even stand for?

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