Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
It's fine, I'm usually stuck in a superposition of 60% "my beliefs are correct" and 40% "my beliefs are utterly, hopelessly wrong" and my constant awareness of the latter possibility makes a lot of very dismissive behavior seem reasonable.
What I am trying to say is that logic is the map, and reality is the territory. The fact that logic cannot prove whether reality exists does not mean reality does not exist. If the map burns up, or omits an important detail, that won't actually affect reality. A better word choice than "worthless" would have been "inaccurate." Plenty of systems of logic are internally consistent, but only one actually describes reality.
From logic's perspective, sure, no system of logic is more valid than any other. From reality's perspective, only one system of logic is correct, and it is objectively correct.
And yes, I know this due to logic, so there's a chance I'm wrong, but causality flows from reality to logic, not the reverse.
This is why I compared morality to logic. Logic, and math, describe reality. It's not that some mathematical axioms are better than others because they lead to outcomes we prefer, it's that they are simply more accurate to reality. You could frame that as an outcome we prefer, I suppose, but that's somewhat misleading, because certain axioms would be more accurate to reality whether or not we're around to prefer them. 1+1 = 2 is primarily descriptive of the way things actually work, and what it describes remains true regardless of our preferences.
My belief is that morality works the same way. Suffering exists independent of our theories and beliefs about it. Thus, it's conceivable that morality exists too, as a descriptive and prescriptive map based on reality. Just like 1+1 = 2 in reality even if you choose axioms which state otherwise, suffering is objectively bad no matter your axioms.
An important caveat is that even if morality does objectively exist, and only a single moral system is objectively consistent (which is my assertion) that doesn't really fix the is/ought problem or obligate someone to value good above evil. So I'm not trying to say it's possible to prove that suffering is wrong, but I do think it's possible to collect all sorts of axioms like that into one objectively correct (i.e. accurate to reality and consistent) system and prove that rejecting one axiom means rejecting the whole system and morality in general.
That's fair. I don't want to start another tangent here; this discussion is already broad enough, but I have interacted with many people who believe in religion the same way you believe in gravity. They were generally uneducated, poor, extremely unintelligent people. I had a very hard time communicating even simple if-then statements with them. They take both religion and gravity on faith and I think that's much safer than asking them to apply skepticism to things their society says is true, haha.
Well, again, the theory I've expounded would pretty directly imply that angels are allergic to cameras, yeah. At least until they decide otherwise. If they visit someone then it's usually meant to be a visit just for that one person.
My own religion has always heavily emphasized personal revelation. This isn't exactly a new idea to Christianity though, it's contained in the Bible! Matthew 13:58 says that Jesus declined to perform many miracles in his homeland due to people's unbelief there. If miracles would have benefitted those people then Jesus would have performed them.
I don't think you would. The evidence I have in mind is generally along the lines of "I prayed for X and immediately got it, in a way highly unlikely to be coincidence." In the past I've gone so far as to list everything prayed for, things desired but not prayed for, expected probability of receiving each of those things, and expected time of arrival, then statistically analyzing the results. I didn't randomize which things were prayed for. I probably should have, but I got such strong results that continuing to test it felt ungrateful.
I only did that 2-3 times, but that meant that I had those times as frames of reference, which is how I know that when I'm more morally upright my prayers are way stronger.
I think many would see such behavior as insanity but not of the clinical sort, more of the "excessively neurotic" sort, which I think is appropriate given the nature of the question being investigated.
Sure, in fact I'd say that latter fact is the only one that matters. Of course if you believe strongly in something, you'll have more dreams (or "visions" which is what most angelic sightings are) about that thing, and attach more significance to them. You could describe that as a hallucination but I think it's more complex than that; healthy cognition involves some amount of seeing what you expect to see, because that's just how the brain works.
To be clear the idea wouldn't be to believe there's a 1% chance, but rather to act how you think you might if that were your belief, i.e. pretend there's a 1% chance. If you don't want to, that's fine, but I think everyone is capable of pretense; it's the only way to survive many social situations.
If I had reason to believe I had an invisible bodyguard, i would try and investigate, rather than being satisfied that there's a small chance of an invisible bodyguard following me around. Maybe I'd buy an infrared camera, or fly somewhere and watch for empty seats. The belief would merit further investigation. At some point, if I've seen him on the infrared, maybe I would take my chances in a mugging, but it would take a lot of evidence before then to convince me that that was the right course of action.
I think God's existence is worth investigating. If you think the chance he exists is small, then of course you shouldn't quit your job, sell your house, and donate everything to the church, but I think it does merit a small test, such as a randomized test of the efficacy of personal prayer, if only for curiosity's sake. Then if that result turns out positive, of course it doesn't mean much, but it does mean you should try a bigger and more powerful test. Once enough of these tests turn out positive, it's probably time to start taking the possibility a little more seriously, study it more, maybe find better testing methods than RCPs. This is the path I am describing.
My investigation has yielded evidence and also improved my life. You could describe this as instrumental rationality. I'm sure I'd be less excited to continue investigating if the evidence collection process did not also improve my life. Still, it's not "believe X because belief in X is beneficial." It's more, "I should be spending years investigating the truth of this anyways, because it's that important, but I'm just not that patient or determined. Thankfully I get paid for the investigation, which makes it much easier to keep going." I would never trade epistemic for instrumental rationality (at least at any reasonable exchange rate) but having both is best.
I'm not 100% sure of that. I recall Yudkowsky once shared a gif of a three dots moving in a regular pattern, and asked the viewer to guess the underlying mechanics of the motion.
Most people visualized it as a the points representing the rotating vertices of a triangle, but then with another gif, he demonstrated that there is another way of interpreting the motion with different, yet simple laws of mechanics. The two are isomorphic in this one instance, and as our world demonstrates, we can often come up with theories that are just about as good at describing observed phenomenon and require us to really scratch our heads to figure out the best explanation, dependent as that is on context.
So there well might be one "objective" explanation for all of Reality as it exists, but it is in principle possible to have multiple hypothesis that are equally good and have the same minimal complexity in a mathematical sense. Then you can in practise use any one as you please but reality itself doesn't dictate which one is realer than the others.
Of course, this is all academic until we have a perfect GUT with no errors beyond experimental margins and noise, and even then I think it's a moot point since we can never encompass the territory, only ever better maps of it.
That is a real head scratcher I tell ya. No wonder the phrase "preaching to the choir" exists. You'd think the whole point of miracles would be to sway those who aren't swayed by argumentation, leaving aside the rewards to the faithful.
And yet Jesus is far from the only person who performed miracles so the argument doesn't go very far. Surely Smith demonstrated miracles to the sceptical not too long before living memory?
Dawkins has spilled enough ink on the Invisible Dragon in the garage story that I won't rehash it. Religious belief doesn't protect from cancer or a bullet to the head, and even most of the devout would agree, even if it's only grudgingly so.
My opinion is that you haven't done sufficient due diligence in this regard, not to the extent necessary to make such sweeping claims.
Humans suffer from no end of bias and the ability to perform motivated cognition, Science as we know it is based on minimizing the influence of the individual as far as possible in the light of such flaws. I don't think you're the cowardly type who retreats to "Separate and non-overlapping magisteria" when confronted with that, so I can only apologize that your sincere claims don't convince me on that front.
Further, I have occasionally prayed, maybe idly so, and it didn't do anything.
I won't bother doing again in any context I can think of, the expected utility of such an investigation is minimal or even outright negative since I think even thinking in such a manner is bad for you in subtle ways. Humans have a tendency to have their masks stick, even it worn only briefly.
I'd be an atheist in a foxhole, and if I die I can only fervently wish for more secular forms of an afterlife if I'm that lucky. I am clearly not confident enough in that regard that I won't be doing my best to never find out, short of modestly fraught ideas like destructively scanning my brain and uploading it to a computer.
Sure, but I think that investigation has already been done by both the believers and sceptics alike, and I see no benefit to hashing it out again, the evidence is overwhelming in my eyes, any more than I try to experimentally verify General Relativity beyond checking it my GPS signal works.
Consider how much of your Mormon theology is grossly repugnant to many other Christians here, they'd think you even more woefully misguided than I do. Not that they say so where I see it, this place, while generally accepting of religiosity and atheism alike, makes you friends in a far harbor. In a similar manner I don't argue particularly much with other transhumanists or even ideologies like Effective Altruism which I don't fully endorse.
Do you think they'd find your claims convincing about the truth of Mormonism where it differs from their Catholicism or Protestantism? I sincerely doubt it so I ask you not to think too negatively for me when I'm not convinced.
At any rate, I do genuinely pity you, and I'm sure you pity me too. That's about the best we can wish for, when differences are so irreconcilable. Far better to pity than to hate, and you seem like the kind of person who doesn't have a blanket hatred of the kinds of technology that's doing God's work for him, otherwise you wouldn't read most science fiction or occasionally praise my own scribblings in that regard, which make no pretense about what kind of worldview they endorse.
Either way, it was nice discussing this with you and I wish you well. May we all end up on a similar page before we die.
I'm not so sure this is possible. In a mathematical sense, can any two hypotheses actually be equal in complexity? I think even small differences would render one more complex than the other.
Putting that aside, laws of physics are descriptive. If two different sets of laws have exactly the same predictions in all cases, I'd say it's actually just one set of laws described in two different ways. And if their predictions differ, only one set is the correct one.
In the Bible this is called asking for a sign and is generally frowned upon. If it were important for nonbelievers to be proven wrong, the world would be extremely different. We wouldn't even call such proof miracles. God's glory etc. would be permanently displayed to everyone so that nobody could harbor doubt for even a moment.
As I mentioned earlier, this approach would have big drawbacks. If you know your moral actions will be rewarded, it's easy to learn the wrong lesson from that and do moral things for the rewards rather than because they're the right things to do.
The Book of Mormon also mentions another drawback of this approach, which is basically a theological version of David Foster Wallace's joke:
The idea is that in order for us to even be capable of recognizing God's light we need to also be exposed to darkness. It's impossible to be moral if you are never given a choice one way or another.
I don't recall any, besides the Book of Mormon. A quick google doesn't yield any other results. I'm not saying [miracles to the skeptical] are always bad though; the whole story of Saul/Paul is a counterexample. Just that they're bad (and thus won't happen) if the skeptical person is not ready for them, which is most of the time. Generally the people who see miracles are believers, skeptics who are morally ready to be believers, and skeptics so far gone that they won't be convinced by any amount of proof at all. This why I maintain that if I become a much more moral person and fail to see bigger miracles, then that's good enough modus tollens for me.
A couple of the bigger miracles in my life have been statistically unlikely (both in their timing and in that they happened at all) recoveries from debilitating illnesses, so I'd definitely quibble with you there. One of them was literally brain cancer. I get what you're saying though, since I can't predict when prayer etc. will actually work.
"Pity" isn't really the word that comes to mind--I just think you'd benefit from the tools I have had access to. I'm very happily married and have stable employment, two things I'm confident I personally would not have had without religion.
Sorry for not responding to more of your points--I think they're generally good and well-reasoned, and would love to address them, but it's hard to find time.
Under your belief system, sure, I haven't done enough due diligence, because by definition "enough" would lead me to your beliefs, barring extraordinary coincidence. Under my own I also haven't investigated enough. I'm not satisfied to remain at my current level of saying "I believe" rather than "I know."
So, I'm open to suggestions. I've read the Sequences and a fair bit of atheist literature besides--in fact I've probably read much more atheist literature than religious literature, including the Bible/BoM, to my shame. If you have anything particularly convincing/enlightening then I'll read it though. I'm more interested in experiments, but I've already performed experiments on prayer and fasting. If you have a novel idea for an experiment I could perform I'd be happy to test it out.
Side note, I get what you're saying about masks being inherently sticky, and it applies double to psychology. I think akrasia is a fundamentally dangerous idea because it's probably partially correct and partially self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think so, but bear in my mind my reach exceeds my grasp when it comes to mathematics and physics haha
I'm struggling when it comes to explaining the intuition in a rigorous way, even if I'm quite confident in it.
At least it makes sense to me that this can happen, even if it's not common, after all there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses that explain any given amount of evidence, and it's entirely possible two or more of them have the same Kolmogorov Complexity.
Once again I stress this is less relevant in practice, as you also point out, but I believe it's still true. Humans (and LLMs using autoencoders) have an inherent simplicity prior, so we usually try and pick the least complex explanation for most phenomenon. Usually.
I obviously have a more cynical explanation in mind. I find any efforts to reconcile the abundance of miracles in the past with their paucity in the present highly suspect.
At the very least you must admit that "prophets" tend to be given less than ambiguous information.
I can far easier swallow no intervention from a disinterested Creator and omnipresent or frequent intervention than I can the middle ground of it happening just a little too sparsely for us to be confident of it.
Further, I think it's grossly unethical to confront a flawed being like a human with the possibility of endless fulfillment versus infinite suffering in the form of Heaven and Hell and not give them sufficient information to make an informed decision. You might well disagree that you have "sufficient" information. It would make far more sense to give everyone the brief and then condemn those who stray.
(Even if the latter is a joke in the eyes of an omniscient entity who knows exactly what a soul will do before it's put in a position to mess itself up)
What exactly is "morally ready" but a convenient rug to sweep counterarguments under? Some of them were skeptical, were they not?
Certainly I'm not the latter, if I had concrete evidence of God that is distinguishable from the normal operations of the laws of physics, I'd at least consider it (and this being a Simulator fucking with me, or me going insane).
I'm glad you didn't die from that, but is the fervent thanks of the denizens of the odd hut that wasn't swept away by a tsunami any consolation to all the others who did?
It seems deeply chauvinistic to think that you are the one person who deserves the big ticket miracles, and not the other millions or billions of earnest believers!
As you acknowledge, the RCTs concur with me, and while a sample size of one isn't nothing, it's not much either.
And simply from anthropics, if you'd been killed by the cancer, you wouldn't be around to tell me how being pious helped..
Err.. Maybe consciously perform an experiment where you intentionally misbehave and flaunt your beliefs? The inverse of what you proposed I'd do.
You'd have to do it over a prolonged period of time to get enough data, and I'm not sure you even like the idea.
It depends on if the correlation you describe between being better and more obvious miracles holds in the obverse, do you expect to sprain your foot or get hit by a bus if you suddenly become the world's worst anti-Mormon? If not, you'll just get more evidence of nothing much at all happening, or the absence of miracles, and I don't know what the base rate for that is in your eyes.
Or at least you could try to be the secular idea of a "good person", someone who absolutely doesn't believe in the supernatural yet tries to do good in their eyes. I trust you can figure out how to do that, but I suspect you're just as incapable of actually banishing your belief in God on demand as I am to embrace it, or even the 1% suggestion you extended.
Knowledge has its upsides and downsides. Eventually we'll all come to know the truth but in the meantime whether someone will benefit from a given piece of truth varies depending on the timing and the individual. Prophets, along with anyone else more morally advanced than the average person, are in a different situation where they are usually ready for more knowledge. Thus what they receive is usually less ambiguous.
I can explain my beliefs along these lines much further, and am happy to do so, but these are pretty basic objections and I'm confused why you're making them. I feel like "knowledge has downsides" explained prophets well enough already if you put a bit of thought into it.
I don't believe in either end of this--infinite suffering or insufficient information. Firstly nobody even has the ability to go to hell unless they have full understanding of their choice, and then they have to commit truly heinous actions. Judas Iscariot is the prime example. Secondly, and this is extremely speculative, my understanding is that while hell will probably last a long time it still will not last forever, and eventually those consigned to it will evaporate into whatever base-level awareness they existed as before they were made into spirits.
The condemnation doesn't happen until after everyone is given the brief. The point of Earth is for us to learn, not to see who slips up and strays when given the chance.
I don't really want to rehash this conversation, but I disagree that determinism and agency are contradictory.
I don't doubt you'd believe in God if you were given enough evidence, but there are big drawbacks with that as I've already stated. "Morally ready" was probably a bad way to frame that; I don't mean to imply (nor do I actually believe) you're less moral than I am, but just that given who you currently are, clear evidence of God would be more likely to hurt you than help you. This is also true of me.
It was a sibling, not me. And I don't think we deserved it necessarily, which is why I can't predict when prayer will or won't work. We don't really believe in "deserving" things in general--the basic belief is that we all deserve nothing and are granted endless blessings such as life, human experience, music, etc. by the grace of God.
My own health miracle was a debilitating, but not terminal, illness. I was on a medication to clear it up, but it was supposed to work within 1.5 months and it had been IIRC 6-7 without any improvement. I felt far better one day, the best by far I had since being diagnosed with the illness, offhandedly mentioned it to a family member, and then learned from them that my extended family had performed a fast for my health the previous day without my knowledge.
This was priceless to me because it felt like God knew exactly what I needed. I was extremely concerned that despite all of my tests, my inability to properly control them made them, in the end, worthless. I considered myself more or less incapable of determining the truth of my church because I was maybe biased towards the church being true, and as we've seen with parapsychology and many other fields since, in all but the hardest fields of science the bias of the researcher is powerful enough to overcome all of our methodological tools put together. So God saw fit to give me a miracle I could not quite so easily explain away as placebo--a statistically unlikely faith healing which I wasn't even aware had happened until after the fact.
This is probably one of the main reasons I believe as much as I do--I performed that test and the results were horrible. It would be idiotic to try again, like covering every inch of my skin with fire ants to verify that they're always painful vs just painful in the spot where I first got bit. It wasn't a randomized controlled trial of which sins to perform, so it wasn't exactly a perfect test, but the results were strong enough I'm not going to try to repeat it.
I'd generally expect life to get worse, and I'd expect myself to get less intelligent. It wouldn't necessarily manifest in physical harm. But that's the same with becoming more righteous--I don't necessarily expect any specific blessings from generally becoming a better person. Prayer/fasting are the exceptions because it's there that I ask for specific things, which makes it easier to objectively evaluate the results.
This is why I tested prayer + fasting first and most intensively. If the truth is just "being a good person leads to personal benefits" then prayer and fasting are not likely to be helpful. I also tested meditation, to check and see whether the benefits of prayer had more to do with mindfulness rather than actual divine intervention, and the results were of course negligible. I think the meditation test is a good version of what you're suggesting, and I'm not eager to repeat it. "Doing good in a secular way" doesn't really work because it doesn't distinguish between the two hypotheses I consider most likely.
I remember Scott mentioned once that a blast of cold water in the ear is strangely likely to temporarily dispel delusions. That would be an interesting thing to test, and probably something everyone should try at some point, if it's even half as effective as he thought it was.
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