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 -
I don’t have a specific number in mind but the reason theism predicts life is that
it’s (by comparison to the multiverse) simple in terms of number of parts involved,
it can explain the order of the universe (as god executing a design plan as opposed to it being a lot of arbitrary detail)
life would be preferred by god because life is necessary for most, if not all, good things to exist, and a rational being would prefer the good. (This part involves value realism, but if you don’t like that then you can just add it into the hypothesis alongside theism and, as long as you don’t think the prior probability of moral realism is prohibitively low, it wouldn’t cancel out the explanatory benefits of theism with respect to fine tuning)
What do you think the probability of life given non-theism is, and why?
Would a rational being prefer for there not to be evil? Life (organic or artificial) seems required for evil. You can postulate that God would prefer the existence of good to the non-existence of evil, but that's not implied by theism per se, and hence doesn't factor into P(E2 | H1).
And even if it did, E2 is not the evidence that can have a significant confirmation of theism or Christian theism - E1 is. That life exists somewhere in the universe is highly probable given the laws of nature and the size/composition of the universe. However, I would be very surprised if you could provide a rationale that P(E1 | H1) or P(E1 | H2) are different from P(E1). Nothing in Christianity (AFAIK) implies that God would create life on Earth in the time it developed, rather than the trillions of other suitable points in spacetime.
The other two bits seem to be about what you think are comparative merits of a theistic explanation, but I'm not even convinced that theism predicts the existence of life.
I have no idea. I don't have the information required to make a sensible probabilistic model of the problem, and I can't determine a series of coherent, evidence-based likelihoods (outside of special cases) without that model.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link