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I've been agnostic, rather than atheist, for most of my life. My argument was that life is too complex, especially with how organs work, for there not to be someone planning it. I guess the best word for my beliefs would be deist, but I only learned the term recently.
Anyway, I just read an essay by Yudkowsky and I'm now convinced there is almost certainly no God. This depresses me because I want there to be a God.. which is to say, an unmoved mover at the beginning of time that is sentient. The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient? I'd appreciate help with this, because I want to convince myself there may be a God.
If God were the programmer of a simulation that you live in, how would it look different that the God we know?
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You can't go back to who you were before. You'll have to live with your newfound (lack of) belief.
That one almost got me. He certainly is a clever evangelist.
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He writes an entire post about evolution not having a telos and that humans like to see intentionality where there is none, then ends with this (and I realise it is at least partly tongue-in-cheek):
But if evolution is Azathoth, there is no outwitting it. It is pure, raw, potentiality and humans are part of the universe where Azathoth is the motive force. This is like an ant exulting over outwitting the homeowner that hasn't put down powder to prevent them entering the kitchen - as soon as the superior power notices you, it's the end of you.
Besides, it's not Azathoth you need to outwit, it's Nyarlathotep, and he's much, much smarter, meaner, more devious, and nastier.
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Sure, just read Genesis 1:27…
And Hebrews 13:8…
And of course, there’s John 1:1-5…
If you hold the authority of the Bible to be true, which it is, then there’s ample evidence to believe in a living God that exists apart from time and is the creator of everything. His existence is beyond our comprehension, which takes a reasonable man with humility to appreciate. You want there to be a God. Of course! That’s because God has written himself into your/our hearts. From Romans 2:14-15…
So why be depressed? Take joy in the fact that God exists, despite what one internet blogger claims in his own foolishness.
I think you're begging the question here. If @Conservautism believed the bible were true, he wouldn't have explained why he's now an atheist. You need to explain why the Bible is true (the weaker part of your case) rather than why the truth of the Bible implies that God exists, which you spent a rather unnecessary number of words on.
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Oh, I stopped believing the Bible to be true when I was 10, but I continued to believe in God because I thought the complexity of life implied a designer. I think that's what they used to call deism.
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Agnosticism is a method. A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.
For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.
Who or what do you serve? How do you spend your time, energy and money? What causes do you kill and die for? What gives you meaning and purpose?
For a rough functional definition, that's your god.
Strongly disagree here. I believe God to be good, but God doesn't define goodness. Morality is fundamental to reality itself.
I'd like to hear more. So far in my experience when people say that they're just talking about game theory.
Well let me preface this by saying I'm no philosopher, but also I don't believe philosophers have a monopoly on, or even a better-than-average understanding of, philosophy. They are no better at living moral principles than anyone else, and I consider firsthand experience a much better path towards actual truth than any amount of reasoning in a vacuum.
I believe morality is like math in that both exist and can be true or false. You can change your axioms, redefine two to mean three etc., but in the end moral conclusions inevitably follow from moral premises due to the nature of logic itself. Given the same premises, two independent people should always reach the same moral conclusions.
Further, I believe the premises themselves are also objectively correct or incorrect. Some are simply true, others simply false. Maybe a better way to put it is that some are ordered and others disordered, and some correlate with things universally recognized as good while others do not.
The logical equivalent is modus ponens. If you don't accept modus ponens, you don't accept it, but then the rest of logic is cut off to you. You won't accomplish anything. Perhaps, in a vaccuum, it is equally valid to accept or reject modus ponens, but to me it is straightforwardly obvious that modus ponens is simple Truth as defined by reality itself.
I believe we can experimentally verify moral axioms. Like with modus ponens, accepting a correct moral axiom will lead to more progress, growth, success, and sophistication in one's life and philosophy than rejecting it.
In the end I have to say this is mostly post-hoc justification, though, and my main reason for this belief is simple intuition. Certain beliefs--such as the belief that purposeless suffering is bad--feel just as objectively correct to me as any mathematical or logical proof.
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OP said they wished they could believe in God. But this, while attempting to give advice, is basically presuming God is dead, which defeats the purpose.
If a person came to you and said "I really wanted to believe in quantum mechanics" after a particularly devastating article debunking it, it'd be very strange to tell them "well, quantum mechanics is whatever you want so long as you define it thus" (although this is true if you're a comic writer). Presumably they want to believe in something actually real that quantum mechanics points to and it does them little good to redefine quantum entanglement to mean the unseen connections that bind all people.
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What argument that Yudkowsky made did you find convincing?
I admit I'm saying this from a perspective of finding the essay you linked banal and deeply uninteresting. It shows, I think, that it's from 2007 - it's a bit of sub-Dawkinsian New Atheist tat. Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this. The inference to God from nature was never premised on the idea that there is no evil in nature. On the contrary, evil spiritual forces and sin are also inferred from nature. No religion that I'm aware of asserts that this world must necessarily be a paradise, or that it cannot contain seeming chaos, orderliness, pain, or suffering.
You'd have to construct at least a basic syllogism to make that an argument against God - "If God exists, he would eliminate evil; evil exists; therefore God does not exist". We could jump straight into theodicy. But Yudkowsky doesn't seem to even offer that much? There just isn't any substance there.
But it sounds like something in Yudkowsky's essay really spoke to you, or hit on something you'd been asking yourself?
It's not that nature is cruel, but rather, that it's nonsensically cruel that's gotten to me. The artifacts that come from evolution truly being random.
The Fundamental Question of Rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?", or alternatively, "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" - LessWrong
If you find a mechanical wristwatch sitting on the side of the road, and when you take it home you discover it only ticks forward fifty-eight minutes every hour, you don’t believe it to have been imperfectly made to begin with; you believe its perfection to have become corrupted through circumstance.
Yud’s whole telos is using the scientific method (and Bayes Theorum) for everything in life. That’s the core of rationalism. The core of the scientific method is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd or intricate, must be the truth. Science is perpetually trying to falsify all assumptions, all explanations, so that the truth may be seen in its naked glory.
But in that essay he spoke about a Judeo-Christian God, without the specifics of theology of any single religion, sect, or cult within that wide umbrella. He referenced a belief in a loving, immanent, benevolent God who deliberately used a cruel process of death and suffering to refine slugs to apes, and apes to humans, for the purpose of proclaiming His glory forever after death. And he did a fine job of destroying those cosmologies which embrace this patent absurdity.
Ken Ham, the premier creationist, does the same, using the same evidence.
Yes, Eliezer Yudkowsky has more in common with Ken Ham than either do with the theologians of ecumenical denominations, whether Judaic, Christian, or Hindu. Both Ham and Yud believe in a specific historical sequence (heh) of events which led to the world we live in now. Both believe in, and proclaim loudly, the purposelessness of evolution, and both loudly proclaim it is not God who made the world a place of toothless elephants or fat humans.
But where Yud says it is only man which brings the light of intellect to the universe, Ham points to the very first part of the ancient Scriptures of his religion and says it was man, not God, whose choice brought death into the world, who wrought entropy across the surface of the Earth and ended the perfection of a loving God’s garden.
Yudkowsky did not show that the artifacts of purposelessness inherent in an entropic and random world must be the result of a vast regression of chaos to the beginning of time; he didn’t see a need to falsify the only alternative which also fits the evidence.
Where he sees a Bronze Age civilization’s myths and just-so stories, Ham sees a miraculously preserved historical narrative documenting in detail a fall from a perfect world created by omniscience, resulting in the world we can see and measure, and dinosaur fossils we can dig up as evidence of this true history.
The mere existence of the “problem of pain” argument, however artfully phrased and carefully evidenced, is not in itself a proof of the nonexistence of the God of the Bible.
Now, I know I’m not going to convince anyone on this forum (of all places) to trust Ken Ham over Eliezer Yudkowsky. What I’m doing is making it crystal clear that Yud has handily falsified the weakman argument. The strongman is nowhere to be found in that essay.
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We have also always known that there is great apparent design in nature too, which people have taken to mean a designer with some sort of experience (since that's the easiest way to conceptualize the work being done).
If you look at the arms race between predator and prey, adaptations made to local conditions and other such things it's easy to see both chaos and design. You can blame the chaos on some sort of plan from the designer (in my religious tradition it's because - what else - humans fucked up) but you have to explain both the variety and how organisms seem to fit their niche.
It's probably especially important given the timescales certain religions claim (which are relatively truncated).
You're right, this is simplistic thinking (pointed out by Charles Taylor that "Darwin refuted the Bible" was said in the 1890s by a Harrow schoolboy; 2010s atheists weren't exactly breaking new ground) but I've actually gone on a journey similar to the midwit meme here: "Evolution disproved religion" -> "actually, it was probably a complex interplay of material and ideological factors involving the Protestan..." -> "Evolution disproved religion".
I don't think this has an impact on certain other philosophical arguments from God, but it undermines one of the most intuitive reasons to believe in one and when you start going down that road...eventually you may find that you don't need an alternate explanation. This is where people like Graham Oppy end up: most of the philosophical arguments are at least hard to conclusively settle but naturalism works without the need for additional supernatural entities and forces.
Yudkowsky makes much of "this aspect and that aspect of nature is cruel" but why do we think that? It's all part of the push and pull of varying forces. What is it about humans that makes us pass value judgements like "this is cruel, this is evil, I cannot accept a god that includes this as part of the world"?
That's the itch that is never scratched by atheism. We can reduce our feelings about cruelty down to "in the end, it's because what is 'cruel' is painful, and all organisms want to avoid pain and find pleasure, it's an instinctual drive" and get rid of morality in that way. But I think few people find "There is no morality, it's just what makes us go 'yuck' and we are now too smart and modern to give the disgust reaction any right over our behaviour".
If disgust reaction is no reason to go "homosexuality is wrong", it is also no reason to go "elderly elephants dying of starvation is cruel".
This Yudkowsky essay is about precisely this question.
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Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.
Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.
I think the correct word is hope. You can hope something is true but its desirability shouldn't affect your actual beliefs one way or the other.
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While in the vernacular it's common to use Agnostic to mean "I don't really know but I think it's possible" and Atheist to mean "I believe there is no God" I think you'll find that when pushed hard to really clarify exactly what Belief and Knowledge are that most of what we think of as knowledge claims are in fact belief claims. I do not "know" that say (purely for example), the Chicago School of Economics is true. But I may perhaps "believe" that it is. Or to be even more pedantic, I may assign a 90% chance in my head that I think it's true, a 5% chance it's flawed but mostly true, and leave the remaining 5%.
I do not "know" that I am not a brain in a vat in a jar experiencing a simulation. But I don't find this particularly likely, and am happy to say that I believe my toothpaste exists and should be applied before bed. Even though if sufficiently pushed I'd be stuck arguing that, yes, it's true. I can't be literally 100% confident about my toothpaste the same way I am that A = A. This 'mere belief' state of affairs has yet to stop me from brushing my teeth before bed.
In that sense the vast majority of Atheists are, more precisely, Agnostic Atheists, and are happy to describe themselves as such. They do not Know, but they lack assertive belief that God exists. Much like how I lack a belief in the efficacy of Mercantilism, even if I can't write a PhD paper explaining why. Atheists may vary in the particulars. One may give God a 10% chance, which isn't enough for him to believe in a positive existence. Another may say God's likelyhood is less than 1%! I have even seen someone describe himself as an Asymptotic Atheist. His credence towards Gods existence approached infinity but never quite touched "cannot possibly exist".
Actual "God does not exist, 100%, stop" Atheists do exist. They'll have uncommon definitional arguments about how all sufficient definitions of God are inherently incoherent or contradictory. But these are rare indeed, and functionally arn't all that different than a mainstream Atheist.
Perhaps you will find your argument for God and change your mind. Perhaps you will look back at this moment as your crisis of faith and in the end it was the testing fire you needed to harden your spirit into a faith a strong as steel.
I can't prevent you from doing that. But what I can say is that even losing all faith that God exists, the world is still beautiful. Painfully, overwhelmingly, & shockingly beautiful. It's the beauty of a cherry blossom caught in the wind between branch and ground. We travel in the now between the Scylla of pre-existence and the Charybdis of our species eventual end. In this precious moment we exist and are lucky enough to be conscious of it. There is no reason for our morals to atrophy or our marvel of the natural world to diminish because what we do now is only heightened in importance by it's transience. There is a joy to be had in the self regard as one made in the image of God. But when that disappears it does not stay a God shaped hole in the heart. Rather, I regard every piece of civilization as a precious jewel against the void from which we came. Humanity as universe's greatest happenstance. We could have stayed as brutes. We could have been born and winked out of existence. Humanity was once reduced to nearly a thousand people!
But today an atheist can go to the cathedral in Cologne and tremble at how passionate humanity was even during poorer times. And a believer can know his doctor is an atheist and realize that his doctor regards his life as something that once extinguished is gone forever, and that his doctors will fight like hell to help him get back to good health as a result. And we can all build something together and marvel at this incredible world we all live in.
There is no shortage of arguments intended to pull you back to a faith in a Creater Deity. But if you should wonder once more about the other side then here:
If you want the old argument, then read De Rerum Natura De Rerum Natura. On The Nature of Things. And realize that these notions about the world are by no means new.
If you want the new argument, then read On the Big Picture, by Sean Carrol. And really understand how we got to this point.
Finally, the rationalists are sometimes cringe. But even in their cringe they have a point. You said "I want to convince myself there is a God". I ask you to consider instead, their Litany of Tarski. Contrast your desire to believe in something you find comforting vs whether you can can find real comfort in belief in something you know just isn't so. And consider instead your desire to believe what is true. That:
If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Thank you so much. I wish I had more to say than that, but you have been a huge help.
I kept thinking that I should respond to this with some other longwinded paragraph of text. But you are right. and I'll keep it simple. I'm happy that I could help. Anyone wrestling with these questions deserves nothing less.
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Do you really want the unmoved mover at the beginning of time? Are you fine with it existing outside of time? Is it ok if it's galaxy brained beyond human comprehension?
I'm agnostic myself, but I put enough stock in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Would you settle for every possible mind of every size and shape that does not logically contradict loving you- doing so from somewhere in the multiverse and the multiverse containing a mathematically complete set of such things all loving one another?
The unmoved mover at the beginning of time is difficult for us to comprehend conceptually, but (a) our comprehension of the primordial laws of the universe is limited, so all we’re saying is “that doesn’t seem legit” and (b) it certainly doesn’t seem less realistic conceptually than an all-loving, all-knowing God who cares personally about the life of every human, who has a strong personality and who sent himself down to earth to pass down some arbitrary rules for human society at his leisure a couple of thousand years ago.
We can really delineate several categories of claim.
(1) There is ‘something’ that is ‘out there’. Trivially true, it’s very unlikely we’re the most intelligent or advanced beings in the entire universe, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, there are probably lifeforms with a much deeper understanding of the underlying laws of reality than ourselves, yadda yadda.
(2) The simulation hypothesis is plausible; our current primitive computing after a century of development is already capable of extraordinary things, after another thousand or million years of development simulating an entire universe seems completely feasible.
(3) The Abrahamic (or equivalent) omni-x God is real. This is the most radical claim, since even the simulation hypothesis involves, somewhere down the chain, the organic emergence of the intelligence that created the simulation. Knowing everything that has ever happened or will happen, in any multiverse/form of reality, forever, existing outside of time, loving everyone and yet still caring deeply about humans and a specific little planet called earth where he really cares tremendously about whether I eat lobster, this is less believable, aesthetically at least.
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I mean, sure, it can exist outside time. But I thought the multiverse was just a trope in fiction, like time travel.
Science now posits that our space-time continuum is one of many “branes” floating in a pseudospace, and occasionally bumping into each other causing Big Bangs within them.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Shakespeare
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Sure. Imagine you write a computer simulation, with little creatures running around, doing whatever. By your definition of god, you are the god of the universe you see on your screen.
Now, imagine you make your little critters carry some gene-like information that determines their physical characteristics and behavior, make them eat and die and reproduce, then add random noise to their genes.
Your simulation now has evolution; your code for reproduction (and the RNG) is exactly the "alien god" Yudowski talks about. That doesnt make you any less of the creator of these creatures.
You could even design your simulation such that you could put your finger on the scales, without it being possible to tell from within the simulation. Just add save states, or design some way of bending the RNG to your will. The "intelligent design" hypothesis is now true in the universe you created.
Finally, imagine that you make your simulation increasingly more complex - simulate cells, then molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles, at greater and greater scales - until your simulation literally describes our universe. Your simulation still has evolution - in fact, at the point of convergence, the literal exact same evolution that we see in our universe - but you're still god to your creation.
Now, as the creator, you're omnipotent and could thus choose to manifest to your subjects exactly like the christian god, or any other god humans believe in. Hell, perhaps you decide to mess with the humans, and act as all known dieties at different times to different people, just to see what happens.
Sure, simulating out entire universe might not be possible with the physics we have at hand. But, just as while the physics in the first iteration of your simulation wouldn't permit one of your critters building an identical simulation-in-a-simulation, that doesn't mean that you couldn't do it - the physics in our universe are more powerful than theirs, so it was a simple task for you - so could the physics of a universe outside of ours make it possible to simulate our universe.
There's nothing about evolution that's incompatible with any god, by the very definition of 'god', because the god could just exist in a meta-universe where the physics of this universe don't apply.
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