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Walking on water was only seen by Christ's disciples, who had already chosen to follow him. Would you consider bread and fishes glaringly obvious? I wouldn't.
More generally, Christ was very clear and intentional most of the time about keeping his miracles secret. When he raised people from the dead he generally allowed 1-2 people in to see it, if any. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that ambiguity is better for our moral development.
Pretty clear is not perfectly clear. Evidence of God is not a stepwise function. The more evidence you have, the more moral responsibility you have too. Some ambiguity is still present even when the evidence is overwhelming.
You make two arguments here:
Christians holds God's existence as axiomatic, which leads them astray
It is evident that God doesn't exist
2 is debatable. 1 is just dirty rhetorical tactics. Christians obviously do not hold the existence of God as axiomatic, or none would ever leave the church. If you can change your mind about an axiom based on evidence then it's not an axiom. Characterizing belief-in-God as axiomatic is just shorthand for "how dare they disagree with me even though I think they're wrong." More importantly, epicycles are a perfectly rational way of explaining a phenomenon given sufficient evidence for that phenomenon. The laws of physics as currently understood contain just as many epicycles, if not more.
You continue to make this claim without engaging with counterarguments. Even in this thread, @FCfromSSC directly defined hell as "the absence of God" which is quite a bit different from how you characterize it here (as a place God sends people).
It's perfectly consistent for God to value agency above all else, especially since it's agency that gives meaning to moral virtue. It's perfectly consistent to suppose that if God did create people who were incapable of evil, he would not be granting them agency at all.
OK. Now do the whole Old Testament.
I'm using axiomatic to include priors with a probability of both 1 and 1-epsilon. Mathematicians regularly employ axioms, yet are open to reconsidering what they consider axiomatic if the downstream consequences are conflicting or nonsensical, they consider adjusting their upstream assumptions.
Who knows how the brain actually encodes Bayesian priors (it actually does do that, as best as we can tell), it might not be possible for a prior in the brain to be literally one or zero, but observational evidence tells me some people get close, and no amount of evidence anyone can feasibly muster can move them.
Frankly speaking that you even consider point 2 to even be up for debate given most reasonable starting priors, is strong evidence of point 1. What exactly would it take to convince you that God doesn't exist?
The whole omniscience part makes the concept of "agency" rather dubious doesn't it? Ah yes, I know perfectly well in advance if you're going to take the red pill or the blue pill, sucks that you're with 100% certainty going to take the one I've laced with cyanide. On you kid, L+ratio.
I asked Bing what the general consensus about what Hell actually is is the myriad strains of Christianity. Said consensus apparent doesn't exist.
I don't see Hell as the "absence of God" as a mainstream position, and given that it clearly seems to me that he's on an extended vacation, if this counts as Hell, then call me a happy sinner.
Besides, the number of epicycles that a theory is allowed to hold before it ought to be rejected is clearly a function of how useful said theory is at predicting experimental results and constraining expectations. The Standard Model of Physics does an awful lot better at predicting the nature and evolution of the universe than the Bible does, so we can tack on Dark Matter or Dark Energy with the clear knowledge that something must be missing in our understanding.
All the people in the Old Testament are constantly denying God, worshipping idols, etc. even after seeing miracles. Obviously the evidence they saw was still ambiguous or they wouldn't be doing those things.
1-epsilon still doesn't address the people that leave the church, it just sounds like it does.
This is a good thing and is how evidence should work. If something is true, it should be difficult to dissuade someone. If someone has seen lots of evidence for something over the course of their life, of course counterbalancing that evidence will also require quite a lot of work, possibly more than anyone can feasibly muster. Being confident in a belief is not the same thing as adopting that belief as an axiom.
Either you're wrong or they use a different definition of "axiom" than the commonly accepted one. Like I said, if your axioms depend on evidence, they're not axioms at all. Sounds like their actual axioms are something like "truth must be consistent", and the things you describe as axioms would be better characterized as useful assumptions. There is no such thing as a downstream axiom--it's either an axiom or it's not one.
To be honest none of those Bing options really address that; they're more concerned with the ultimate fate of people who get sent to Hell, not the nature of what Hell is. This is obvious enough that I question why you even included that point. I asked Bing "please describe a few commonly-held beliefs regarding the nature of christian hell" and on my first try got a much better response:
So, obviously "hell is the absence of God" is in fact a pretty mainstream position.
Yes I know. So now we're back to square one, as I was saying, where your claim is that there's not enough evidence for Christianity. This is a much less interesting criticism than one about epicycles, forgetting that epicycles are how we get things like the laws of physics in the first place.
If you don't know which of the pills is laced with cyanide, that's not exactly your choice, is it? If you do know, then it's still your choice even if the choice-offerer knows what your decision will be before you've made it.
Axioms don't depend on evidence; you can pick any axiom you want. Once you've picked one, all the evidence you see is interpreted according to that axiom. You can compare the perspectives on a set of evidence through two axioms, and then pick the perspective you prefer, for whatever reason you prefer it. Picking axioms because you prefer the shape of the evidence-cluster they generate is a basic, intuitive part of human reasoning, and it's fair to say that it involves Axioms being influenced by evidence, if somewhat indirectly.
I agree with this for certain meanings of "axiom". If I accept this definition as true though, it hardly seems problematic to accept the existence of God as axiomatic. I think most of the time when people use the term they really just mean "you're more confident about this than you should be."
That's the sort of sloppiness I've spent a fair amount of time arguing against lately. Axioms are unavoidably necessary, you can't reason without them.
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Seems to me like the majority opinion, or certainly what I would expect from grabbing a random Christian off the street. If the clergy of either hold more nuanced views, they're not doing a good job of promulgating them.
I don't really care to litigate every single definition of Hell someone dragged out from under the closet over the past 2 millennia.
Once again, I point out that even going the definition you keep bringing up, I'm doing perfectly fine as is.
I'm pretty sure that I never claimed that all Christians had an invincible degree of belief in God. I wouldn't expect to see deconverts in that case either.
I contend that it's true for otherwise intelligent Christians, the kind who have actually examined the tenets of their religion instead of just going with general vibes like the majority of any movement do.
I have no way of estimating in any rigorous way how much evidence there is for or against Christianity, yet I can clearly tell which one is overwhelming. Evidently you disagree, and evidently that doesn't convince me, or vice versa.
If the interlocutor knows, then there was no choice at all. I don't even think Free Will is a coherent concept, and the universe is deterministic with the possible exception of random processes at the subatomic level, which doesn't change anything. In principle, I think all sapient entities can be dissected to understand with near perfect accuracy what their response to any given stimuli would be, to the limits determined by Quantum Uncertainty. We simply lack the tools to scan them that accurately, or the compute to render them 1:1 on useful time scales.
Our concept of choice is a useful social fiction, and useful only because we can't actually simulate everyone perfectly.
What is clear to me that an omniscient and omnibenevolent deity ought to know with absolute certainty what anything they create will ever do, and is thus entirely on the hook for any horrors along the way. I deny that this is possible to salvage in any way, though kudos to Apologists for trying their hardest.
You're not in Hell by that definition.
You're the one who went out of your way to respond to the "separation" definition, then tried to claim it wasn't a mainstream definition. Asking you to actually respond to the definition is not asking you to litigate every single definition.
What you claimed was that Christianity holds God as an axiom. To me this is a meaningless statement, since organizations do not actually have beliefs, so I interpreted it as "Christians hold God as an axiom." Still, "otherwise intelligent Christians" leave the church all the time so it doesn't seem to be an axiom for them either. At this point we're left with "anyone who has studied the church, and not left it, holds God's existence as an axiom" which seems unfalsifiable given how much we've warped the definitions at this point. It's easier and more accurate to just say "some people are very confident that Christianity is correct" than to claim that anyone who disagrees with you must only do so because their adoption of axioms prevents them from taking contradictory evidence seriously.
If I offer someone the choice between $100 or $1, they have a choice, even if they will take the $100 every time. I don't see how knowing beforehand somehow removes the choice itself.
I'm not convinced that the limits of Quantum Uncertainty are so limiting at all. The butterfly effect means that even a single atom out of place will almost certainly lead to vastly different outcomes over long enough time scales.
Not that it matters anyways. If our decisions are caused by purely physical phenomena, whether they are predictable or not is irrelevant--either way they are perhaps not truly "ours." At the same time, if they are purely physical, there's the hard problem of consciousness to deal with. I am self-aware, as I assume you are too. I remain unconvinced that consciousness is a property which properly-arranged atoms can produce from nothing. You can define away consciousness the same way you can define away free will--"it's actually just an illusion caused by the underlying atoms"--and doing so seems incorrect.
Do you believe you have moral worth? Do you believe your experiences matter? If so I'd contend that you and I are on the same page. Consciousness exists, as does free will, at least for all intents and purposes.
Basically the entire reason I hop into these debates is to try and focus attention onto this specific point. Pascal's Wager, Free Will, Theodicy, etc. are all interesting debates (and somewhat valuable) but in the end all that matters is our actual estimation of which theories are most valuable/likely. I've worked hard to determine the truth through the scientific method, and would be happy to do so again as part of some double crux. In the meantime, drive-by half-baked philosophy is just annoying and compels me to respond.
Really? What else did you want me to focus on, given that you initially said:
On:
Yeah, divorce all the usual connotations of choice, and you can get away with that. This is about as meaningful a "choice" as observing a sorting function move a before b when sorting a list alphabetically in some programming language.
Give me a MRI machine, a team of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons, and about a billion dollars worth of funding for everything else, and I'll find a way to falsify it. Given that all of those are sorely lacking, you're welcome to agree to disagree. Hardly a more difficult task than finding a new particle by building a new SOTA particle accelerator, shame that nobody wants to do it.
I certainly believe I have moral worth and that my experiences matter, but I only claim that as a fact about my own philosophical predilections, not something with any claim to be objective. If you happened to disagree, I wouldn't even go so far as to dispute that, except if it arose as an inherent contradiction in your own value system.
Until further evidence arrives, it seems to me perfectly alright to assume it will prove as explicable as electricity, elan vital, the Aether and the like. I know which approach is directionally correct, or at least where the smart money goes.
Oh and answer this please, if you're so intent on claiming that I'm not addressing counter-arguments or queries.
What do you mean what else do I want you to focus on? I want you to focus on the separation definition, which is the one you responded to, rather than whining about how it's not mainstream enough to be worth responding to even as you respond to it. Where did I even imply you should focus on something else? I brought up "you aren't engaging with counterarguments" because even in your original response you weren't engaging with the guy's fairly mainstream definition of hell, instead choosing to turn up your nose, ignore it, and go after easier prey.
Please name one connotation of "choice" which this example ignores. If your stance is that "choice" necessarily implies "it's unclear which option will be chosen," that's not a normal connotation of the word.
You're ignoring my actual point. You claimed that "otherwise intelligent Christians" hold God as an axiom. I mentioned the obvious counterexample, which is that plenty of people who truly do study the doctrine later leave the church. What I said about your point being "unfalsifiable" was a complaint that you keep moving the goalposts. Leave the goalposts in place and of course it's falsifiable--I falsified it in my previous comment.
IMO if you don't believe in philosophy as objective truth, you philosophically believe that moral values are not objective truth. Therefore you don't believe you have objective moral worth. Is this correct?
I'm a bit disappointed you ignored the last part of my last comment. Debating is fun, and double cruxes are quite difficult, but really all we're doing here is wasting time if we're not willing to empirically test each other's beliefs.
You're right, I'm giving this more attention than it's worth, but then again I do that for many things on The Motte.
Most people consider that the necessity of assigning blame or punishment hinges a great deal on whether a person could have possibly made a choice counterfactual to what was observed. Hence the exclusion from the death penalty of people who are insane, because they lack "choice" or even understanding. I don't, even if I endorse criminal justice for other reasons, such as an empirical reduction in crime by dissuading those who would commit it if there was no penalty. The "possibility" of there even being another choice is ruled out by the determinism of the universe, at least for all practical purposes, and the illusion persists only because we can't dispel it with with the tools available.
Of course.
If you still can't see what I'm pointing at, my claim is that those who stay after sober reflection and an accurate understanding of modern science have priors on the existence of God which, if not outright axiomatic, are close enough that I don't care to quibble. This is a fact of modernity, a scholarly monk in the 12th century certainly has less science available to choose a materialist alternative.
You are falsifying a view I do not hold, at least after I explained myself quite clearly.
I presume that this edit was too late for you to have read, so please address that now. What evidence could I, or any living assemblage of humans, with a budget of several billions or even a trillion at hand, muster to dissuade you? If you can't answer that, while I can, then there's no room for a double crux in the first place.
Rest assured I have exceedingly low expectations of changing your mind, or vice versa, I consider atheist debate on the Internet to be a moderately enjoyable pastime. All I seek from it are inconsistencies in my own worldview, not that I've spotted any today.
I don't care about the attention you're giving it. My complaint is that you seem to be looking for a soapbox to make points about religion without listening to or internalizing the counterpoints. It's fine for you to care deeply about this and disagree, but repetitively making the same points without even acknowledging your opponent's points (as I pointed out you did by equating his perspective of hell with the one you have in your head) is annoying.
As far as "impractical" purposes, again, I'm not sure the universe is fundamentally deterministic, given the nature of quantum mechanics. The only way to salvage [the illusion that free will is an illusion] is to basically say that people are not brains. "It wasn't actually you that made that decision, it was the atoms in your brain." This is extremely unsatisfying, considering that "you" are the atoms in your brain, and therefore, "you" can make decisions.
And now we get to the actual axioms. I can see why you'd believe this, or believe that moral objectivism is an illusion, but to me this is self-evidently false. People simply have objective value. If the world ceases to exist, something of value will be lost, even without people around to quantify that value.
I don't love the framing of this question. If an organization with billions of dollars devoted all its resources to persuading me of something, I would be very reticent to actually be persuaded, even if the evidence seemed convincing. Presumably it could find or manufacture very good evidence for either side. Besides, people and organizations can't always just produce evidence, especially evidence which may be of a deeply personal nature.
To be very clear, I'm not yet 100% sure that my church is true. For one thing, if I were 100% sure, I wouldn't be making some of the decisions I currently make, such as playing videogames, watching inappropriate TV shows, or wasting time on this forum. This is basically what I mean by "faith"--whatever the strength of beliefs you profess, your actions are what really determine the strength of your belief in God.
My church teaches a very simple way of coming to know the truth. Live morally, and God will give you more knowledge. Accountability is based on knowledge--you can't be blamed for decisions you don't understand--which is why you generally don't obtain knowledge until you're ready for it (until you are morally developed enough to receive it and act upon it). Were this pattern to break--were I to become much more moral than I am now, without a corresponding increase in both understanding and in tangible evidence of God' existence--I would consider that proof positive that I was wrong about religion.
I have also tested more scientific methods, including listing out all prayers, whether the prayed-for thing happened, and my probability estimate of whether it would have happened had I not prayed. These turned out strongly in prayer's favor, but I like the previous approach more--it feels more trustworthy to me. Even though I do track prayers, on the rare occasions when I don't get what I ask for I still often feel momentary doubts that God exists. This is a personal moral failing, but it should show you that my belief in God is not as strong as I would like it to be, or as you think it is. If enough prayers went unanswered for long enough I fear that that might also cause me to lose my faith.
Keeping in mind that God doesn't want to give you more knowledge than you're ready for, what would be enough evidence to convince you that I am right? I'm telling you, straight up, you don't want to be visited by an angel or witness any equivalent level of evidence. Morally it would not change you very much (you would still have the same weaknesses etc.), but it would make you far more accountable for all the bad moral decisions you make in life, and in particular you would actually go to Hell if you later convinced yourself it was a hallucination or something.
There is a path to be followed, and I'm confident that each step on that path provides enough evidence to justify testing out the next step. I'd encourage you to try that path out yourself, and I assure you that if that path ever fails for me then that will be evidence enough that the conclusions which the path points towards (religion etc.) are not correct.
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