Rationality and Religion

1 Introduction

In the Small-scale Questions thread, @TheDag asked:

[H]ow do you handle the paradox of belief? [...] The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament. And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. [...] How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?

This post is my attempt to answer that question.

My apologies in advance for any first-draft typos or errors.

I am an Orthodox Christian -- a convert to Orthodoxy, but not to Christianity in general. I've been reading material from LessWrong/SSC/ACX for about 10 years now, but never considered myself a Rationalist, in large part because of the movement's basically-axiomatic rejection of anything not comporting with a materialist metaphysics. Nevertheless, I'm a natural skeptic and a mathematician by training, and I think I understand, at a visceral level, what TheDag is talking about.

This post is not intended to be an apologia for Religion, Theism, or Orthodox Christianity in particular. Instead, it is an outline of my way of thinking about Reason and Christianity, and why I think that (some forms of) religion -- yes, serious, supernaturalist, actually-believe-the-creeds Christianity complete with ritual and sacraments (in fact, especially that kind) -- is fully compatible with being rational; at least, as rational as we can reasonably expect to be.

Small disclaimer: I'm going to use Christianity, and (sometimes) Orthodox Christianity in particular, as my source of examples/topic of discussion. I (a) do not guarantee that everything I say will be precisely correct Orthodox doctrine (I'm doing my best but I'm not getting feedback from a committee of bishops and theologians) and (b) don't know how applicable this all is outside of Christianity. (It would be kind of weird if I thought that Christianity and other religions were in exactly the same position, since I think Orthodox Christianity is true and other religions varying degrees of less-than-true.)

2 The Goals of Rationality

Why does anyone care about being rational in the first place? The usual answer, which in my opinion is basically correct, is that there are two reasons:

Because it helps you to believe true things rather than false things. ("Epistemic Rationality")
Because it helps you make better choices. ("Instrumental Rationality")

Note that these goals are just that -- goals. There's no law of the universe (at least, there's no non-circular argument) that a particular "Rational" way of thinking will always be the best way to achieve those goals. A particular set of scientific, logical, and probabilistic methods seem to be pretty good, overall, and certainly excel in some domains, but in principal these are secondary to the above goals. Do you want to believe true things and live well, or do you want to Be Rational? Obviously the first, right?

Well...

There's another kind of reason to want to be rational. Maybe you have a skeptical temperament, and have an internal demand for a certain sort of rigor. Or maybe you have developed a kind of self-identification as a Rational Person, which has attached itself to a certain set of assumptions and ways of thinking. Or maybe you like to think of yourself as Intelligent and Rational, and there's this bunch of intelligent people you know, and they all say that thinking in a certain way, and believing in a certain set of axioms, is a prerequisite to being Intelligent and Rational, and theism and rituals and faith and religion is just Dumb Stuff for Irrational People and you don't want to be Dumb and Irrational, right?

(It should go without saying that this is a general You, not about TheDag in particular, but here I am saying it anyway.)

The important thing here is that these temperamental, identity-based, and social reasons for wanting to Be Rational are not, themselves, rational or virtuous. If it's the identity or social reasons that have got you, all I can say is that the faster you admit it to yourself and work on getting rid of them, the better.

But perhaps your troubles are in part due to a skeptical temperament, whether natural or trained, or with a difficulty believing that doing and thinking in ways that are not Rational could possibly lead to believing true things or living well.

In that case, the rest of this essay is for you.

3 Ontology

Some people are Christians because they trust authority figures who tell them it's true. Others are Christian because they believe they've witnessed an inexplicable miracle. There's nothing wrong with these people; many of them are better people than I am; but they are not me.

I am a Christian because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too glib, so let me expand a bit. There is a fundamental mystery of how consciousness can exist in a purely material universe. I don't mean that it's a mystery how something could exhibit intelligent behavior, or have some sort of internal model of the world that contains itself. I mean that the existence of a first-person perspective, of there being an I that sees from my eyes and thinks my thoughts, of there being a quality to experience -- all things that we take for granted -- seem impossible in a materialist ontology. The usual materialist takes either handwave the problem away, or else (inexplicably to me) bite the bullet and deny the existence of the conscious self at all.

Even so, I exist.

Lest I digress into the apologia which I did not intend to write, let me just make my main point here: the existence of a first-person perspective not only reveals materialism to be a premise rather than a conclusion, it poses a problem for the universal applicability of rationality, because while the first person perspective is a universal and undeniable fact, even the best thinkers cannot seem to articulate what, exactly, it is, or delineate it to the point of being able to reason clearly about it -- which is why we see the problem being dismissed as just muddled thinking by others.

My other point in bringing this up is as a segue into talking about exactly how deeply the Theist (or at least, Christian) ontology differs from the Materialist one. A lot of people have this unspoken idea that Christian ontology is essentially the same as materialist ontology, except that there is are extra entities which maybe don't follow the laws of physics, and one of them is "omnipotent" (whatever that means, maybe power level = infinity or something), and we call that one "God".

This is not the Christian ontology.

The actual Christian ontology is something more like this: The fundamental nature of reality does not look like atoms and the void, governed by laws of physics. Rather, the fundamental nature of reality is something which is in most respects unimaginable, but in which what we call personhood and will and morality and love and reason are fundamental attributes. This is God -- not another entity like a star or a chair or a cat or a human, only immaterial and superpowered, but rather, the Person at the heart of all reality, in virtue of which everything that exists (including, of course, the entire material universe and all its physical laws), exists.

This is so fundamentally difficult to get one's mind around that people resort to paradoxes to talk about it: We call God "The Existing One", and yet some Christian theologians have said things like "God is not a being" -- not because they think that God is just some idea, but because our notion of "existence" or "being" imports the idea of a separate entity within the universe, and is insufficient to what -- who -- God is. (More on this in the next section.)

This ontology is probably shocking to people whose habitual assumptions are materialist -- which is true of most people, let alone Rationalists. So they round off theistic claims, in their head, to something like "Superpowered Invisible Man". This concept is, from the Christian perspective, nearer to the truth than pure materialism, but -- the skeptics are right on this one -- being materialist-except-for-this-one-superpowered-dude is not very rational.

But within the ontology I've outlined, Christian beliefs about the world make reasonable sense -- I would say they are rational, not in the sense of being obviously inevitable or circumscribed by reason, but in that they don't pose any problem for a rational person who recognizes his limits and is content with partial understanding.

4 Cataphasis and Apophasis

When people talk about paradoxes in Christianity, they generally mean one of four things:

Doctrines, like the Trinity, which refer to concepts that our minds have a difficult time comprehending, because they are so different from our usual experience and categories.
Counterintuitive truths, expressed in apparently-contradictory language in order to draw attention.
Deliberate paradox in the form of Apophatic theology, meant to explode misconceptions about God and emphasize our inability to comprehend His fundamental nature.
Multiple ways of talking about the same topic that seem to be inconsistent.

Of the second I will have nothing further to say; it is clearly not a problem for rational thinking. Of the first, I want to emphasize that the apparent paradox is due to our inability to understand the concepts involved and nothing more, much like how arithmetic on infinite cardinal numbers is not a "real" paradox just because it doesn't behave like arithmetic on the integers. ("But I understand cardinal arithmetic, down to how it is a consequence of ZFC! If nobody understands the Trinity fully, how could it be reasonable to believe it?" More on that later.)

So let's talk about the third and fourth.

A number of foundational Christian thinkers have divided theology into two parts: Cataphatic, or positive, theology, and Apophatic or negative, theology. Cataphatic theology is what is at play when one says things like "God loves", or "God is merciful", or "God is just"; or that which is expressed in creeds and dogmas. Cataphatic theology is saying the things that we know about God. Apophatic theology is an approach in which, rather than making positive statements about God, we make negative statements about what God is not. (For some easy examples: "God is not material", "God does not have a cause outside Himself".)

Apophasis often takes the form of paradox when juxtaposed with cataphatic statements, because, first, our concepts which are employed in cataphatic statements will smuggle in implications or impressions which are not true, and second, because this paradox emphasizes our inability to comprehend the full truth about God. I mentioned the apophatic "God is not a being" above, for instance, which seems to contradict theism, but actually the point is that our notion of "being" or "existence" is not really applicable to God.

One might think of apophatic theology's relationship to cataphatic theology as trying to help us understand the "map" of cataphatic doctrine as a guide to the "territory" of who God is and how we relate to God, by continually pulling our attention to the fact that the map is not the territory. This isn't irrational paradox at all, but our continual reminder that the person at the center of reality is not something we can really get our minds around, and we're better off not imagining that we can.

(Digression: Apophatic theology is not unique to Christianity; there is something very similar in Neoplatonism as well as, I think, in Taoism ("The Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao.").)

Finally, the fourth kind of paradox. It is much like the third, except that multiple counterbalancing positive statements are made, each pointing to part of a truth which is too difficult for us to really get our heads around. Now of course it is possible to excuse nonsense as "just different aspects of an incomprehensible truth," but the thing can really happen as well as being faked.

Let's take an example: What's the deal with sin? Why is it bad for me to sin? (other than it being bad for the people I harm)? The following answers are all defensible from both the Bible and Christian Tradition:

Sin is breaking God's rules. It makes God angry, and He will punish you for it. (BUT: Doesn't the Bible also say that God hates no one and is quick to forgive?)
Sin is bad because it's foolish, and tends to lead to bad natural consequences: material, psychological, or social. (BUT: People who do bad things often end up ahead.)
Sin is like a progressive illness; if you sin, you get sicker, and eventually you'll be miserable (unless you get cured). (BUT: where's the will and personal guilt in all this? And why do I need to consent to being cured?)
Sin separates you from God, and the absence of God's love ends up in misery. (BUT: How can anyone be separated from God and God's love, if God is everywhere and in everything, and loves everyone?)
Sin breaks your relationship with God (BUT: a human's relationship with God is only similar by analogy to our relationship with other humans, and how could this be broken, since God doesn't get emotional baggage like humans do?)
Sinning makes you into the sort of person that finds the presence of God intolerable. (BUT: how does that even work?)

(I probably left some out.) For what it's worth, I -- and many Orthodox theologians -- think the last one is probably closest to the truth, but in some ways it's the least actionable. What we get is all of them: partly because each of them is the right model for some occasions, and we, being unable to really understand the underlying reality, need a multiplicity of models for different circumstances. "All models are wrong, but some are useful," indeed.

5 Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Have Believed

This section title refers, of course, to Jesus's words to the Apostle Thomas -- after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the Apostles, but for some reason, Thomas isn't with them. The rest tell Thomas, but he -- being a bit of a skeptic -- refuses to believe unless he can verify it for himself (down to unfakeable physical proof). Later, Jesus appears to all of them, offers that proof to Thomas -- and then gives a blessing to "those who have not seen and yet have believed".

There is an epistemic issue -- two, maybe -- that a lot of rational/skeptical people have with Christianity, and it's this. A lot of Christian doctrine contains claims that cannot be verified by anyone alive today (e.g the Crucifixion and Resurrection), or even could not have been directly verified by human observation at all (e.g. the Trinity).

The first is not, in principle, a problem. Everyone believes lots of things they can't verify, even things that nobody can verify now (historical events, e.g.), because they trust in the body of people who did observe those things and those who have passed on the report. They are not wrong to do so! Very little can be empirically verified by an individual. So part of the question, then, is how trustworthy are the people who reported and passed down these events? Since this is not an apologia I won't get into the weeds here (and also I'm not really an expert), so I'll just say that I think a good case can be made that the answer is "Pretty darned trustworthy, all things considered". Still, some of the claims made are pretty wild (cf Resurrection) if you haven't already accepted the overall metaphysics, so skepticism is understandable.

The second is more of a problem. How can anyone, no matter how honest or intelligent, come to know something like the doctrine of the Trinity, which is (a) something that can't be (physically) observed, and (b) admittedly not fully comprehensible by anyone? Christianity, of course, has an answer: it was revealed by God -- through the words of prophets, or Jesus, or by a revelation given to some of the Apostles. That's an explanation, but it has one problem: it does not bridge the epistemic gap for those who don't already broadly accept Christianity.

Here's the thing: this is fine. Nobody should be asked to accept these things just on the say-so of people they aren't sure they can trust. It is not rational to do so, but it's also not necessary. There are good ways to bridge that gap, such that blind belief is not required.

Roughly, it works like this: you get good evidence, of some sort, that at least some of the claims are true. Since all these claims are coming from the same source, they are tied together -- belief in one should increase your estimation that the source is a good one, and thus that the others, which you can't verify, are true as well. Coming to believe in the others to an extent, you see how they fit together (and/or find that believing other claims has good results). At some point a threshold is passed, and you believe not in the truth of this or that statement, but in the whole edifice, even those parts you don't understand (yet), because, as Chesterton put it, you find that Christianity is a truth-telling thing.

Talk to most thoughtful Christians, including many converts, and you'll find that something like this is the process. Maybe they have, like me, some deep philosophical convictions that turn out to be elucidated best by Christian doctrine. Maybe they had an experience that, while maybe not communicable to others, they feel they had no choice but to accept as miraculous, and which pointed them in that direction. Maybe they just found that acting as though the doctrines are true had good results for them that they did not find elsewhere.

As an exercise, I invite you to think about why, from the Orthodox Christian perspective, correct doctrine is so important. It's not because the beliefs, in themselves, are going to save someone ("Even the demons believe -- and tremble!"), nor the converse, that one cannot be saved without specific beliefs (see: the many saints who made errors or lacked knowledge, or the fact that the Church believes that children and idiots can be saved). It's not an arbitrary test, either. Rather, the Church believes that knowing certain truths about God and Humanity's relationship to God helps you, because God is real, and believing true things makes it is easier to be aligned to that reality, which is the real goal.

[ I ran out of characters, so the rest will be in a reply to this post.]

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theCircusWeakman 1yr ago

Thanks for creating this topic. I've been mulling these things over since the earlier thread, in which I promised to explain my views in more detail. (For the purposes of this post, I'm assuming that Christianity is neither conclusively proved nor disproved by logic or science; the question is, in the absence of convincing proof, why be a Christian?). For what it's worth, here are my scattered thoughts on the matter:

You mentioned Chesterton's "truth-telling thing"; but another theme running through Chesterton's apologetics is that "rationalism" ultimately undermines its own foundations. A person becomes a Rationalist (TM) because he thinks truth is objectively valuable, but if he follows the tenets of rationalism to their logical conclusion he discovers that nothing is objectively valuable. A skeptic who begins by doubting everything that can't be confirmed by his own senses must (if he's consistent) end up doubting his senses themselves. Rationality, empiricism, skepticism, etc. are worthwhile tools, but they must yield at some point to pragmatism. We follow them as far as they are useful, but when they stop being useful and start being counter-productive, we have to reach outside of them for some common-sense axioms or external value judgments in order for them to keep working. The question is, working towards what? A saw may be the best tool for cutting a plank, but you don't cut a plank because the saw told you to. You have to have some ultimate project in mind--some terminal goal, independent of the saw, and for which the saw is merely instrumental.

I guess I'm saying my reasons for being religious might be better described as "meta-rational" than "rational." In the earlier thread, multiple people equated rationalism to "epistemic hygiene," and I think that's a good description. Just as physical hygiene prevents us from polluting our bodies with harmful organisms and filth, rationalism prevents us from polluting our epistemology with delusions and superstitions. But hygiene is only a means to an end; nobody treats "be hygienic" as a life goal. Or if they do, we recognize that that person's priorities are messed up. For example, a germophobe obsessed with cleanliness may practice impeccable physical hygiene, but in the process, he sacrifices his overall physical health. He may scrub his hands until his skin is raw; he may throw out all the food in his kitchen if he discovers a single spot of mold on a slice of bread, he may poison himself with the fumes of the industrial-strength cleaning products he applies to every inch of his home. He can't sleep for fear of unconsciously breathing in germs, and his heart is about to give out from the stress of his constant germ-related anxiety. Obviously, this person's obsession with hygiene is detrimental not only to his health, but to almost every other facet of his overall well-being. He needs to scale back his uncompromising commitment to hygiene until it stops jeopardizing his mental and physical health. He needs to apply "meta-hygiene": i.e., to evaluate whether his approach to hygiene has overstepped its usefulness.

Similarly, I think a commitment to epistemic hygiene can be taken too far, when it ceases to promote a person's overall well-being. Again, rationality is generally healthy and useful, and insofar as rationalism makes you better off, you should keep following it. And religion is by no means necessarily a good thing. Suppose you belong to a weird, fundamentalist religion that rejects modern scientific medicine as "witchcraft" and insists that all diseases can be cured with "faith healing" rituals. You suffer from some disease, and despite attending plenty of faith healing rituals you never seem to be improving. Eventually, you discover rationalism, and you determine that these tenets of your religion are false: modern medicine doesn't rely on witchcraft but on well-attested biology, whereas faith healing doesn't work any better than placebo. You leave your old fundamentalist beliefs behind, start going to a real doctor, and your health and overall well-being improves. This kind of outcome is celebrated both by militant atheists and by huge swathes of ordinary Christians, most of whom (in my experience) are happy to apply reason and empiricism to mundane-but-important issues like medicine.

I'm one of those ordinary Christians. I don't think my religion is comparable to the faith-healing cult described above; on the contrary, I think its effects on my life are extremely salutary. My belief that God created the universe as part of his benevolent plan gives me a reason to endure hardship with patience and hope. My belief in God's goodness provides an objective basis for morality that guides my actions and encourages me to follow my conscience. My church community has helped me make plenty of friends whom I trust to share my values. But ultimately, the primary reason I have no interest in abandoning my religion is that my faith provides a foundation of meaning for my whole life. It's only because I believe in Christ that I care about belief at all.

If my life wasn't given to me for a reason, then why should I care if I'm living my life for the wrong reasons? If there is no such thing as "good" and "bad," then how could it be bad for me to wrongly believe in good and bad? If there's no free will, who can judge me for going on believing in free will? If we're all dead in the long run, who cares whether I wrongly believed in life after death? When I say rationalism can't justify itself, I don't just mean in the sense that e.g. mathematics can't prove its own axioms. I mean that the acid of skepticism ultimately dissolves any reason for being a skeptic. Belief is different; as soon as you start to believe, you suddenly have a reason to care whether your beliefs are true.

My views might be different if the Rationalists (TM) I knew were noticeably better off than the Christians I know. But this doesn't seem to be true. The Christians I know tend to be sane, sensible, happy, friendly, calm--more or less in proportion to their devoutness. The Rationalists I know, on the other hand, don't seem to be any happier than the general population; if anything, they seem to be more anxious, aimless, and neurotic than average. In fact, I'd say the most unhappy people I know of--the most miserable nihilists, the doomsayers and blackpillers, the suicide and human extinction advocates--are pretty much all atheists and agnostics. This calls for epistemic meta-hygiene: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

To be clear, I'm just trying to explain why I have no interest in abandoning my religion for the sake of rationalism. I'm not trying to convince rationalists to join my religion. If they're happy where they are, why should they want to change? But at the same time, since I'm happy with my beliefs (rational or not), why should I want to change--especially when, for the reasons given above, I strongly suspect I wouldn't be happy or fulfilled outside a religious worldview? And if, from time to time, some rationalist should decide that he'd be happier in the Church, and if he finds the faith within himself to believe it, why shouldn't he take the plunge? What does he have to lose?

Context

Goodguy 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

I care about the hard problem of consciousness just as much as you do. I think that consciousness is a great mystery that materialism/physicalism has no explanation of. I myself am not a materialist/physicalist. I do not think that it is necessarily possible to explain consciousness in terms of physical phenomena. But I am not a Christian.

It is clear to me that the hard problem of consciousness is a mystery that is currently beyond the reach of science and very possibly might always be beyond the reach of science. But I do not see why that would make me want to be a Christian.

Christianity makes certain concrete claims about reality that, in my opinion, there is no good reason to believe. Just because I think that consciousness is a mystery, why should I think that 2000 years ago, a specific man in the Levant had a special connection to a trans-human force and then rose from the dead? Because a few people wrote books where they said that it happened and also some people have had related visions? For me, that is not convincing enough.

But even if we put aside Christianity's claims about history and just look at what you describe as the Christian ontology... well, there is nothing unique to Christianity about believing that "The fundamental nature of reality does not look like atoms and the void, governed by laws of physics. Rather, the fundamental nature of reality is something which is in most respects unimaginable, but in which what we call personhood and will and morality and love and reason are fundamental attributes." Many non-Christians believe the same thing.

In any case, my main point is that materialism and Christianity are not the only two options. It's fine to just say "You know what, I don't see any way in which consciousness can be explained in terms of material phenomena, and it doesn't seem to me that anyone else has figured this out either, and indeed it's perfectly possible that it turns out that it is in principle impossible for humans to ever figure this out. So I will just admit that this is a mystery."

I'm comfortable with it being a mystery. Would I rather know the answer? Yes, of course I would. But I am very aware that I do not, and I see absolutely no reason to believe that any religion has the answer either.

dovetailing Goodguy 1yr ago

For what it's worth, I don't disagree that there are other options that don't deny consciousness -- my "I'm a Christian because of the Hard Problem" line is certainly a simplification, and my reasons for being Christian in particular are not a clear-cut, single line of reasoning but a bunch of reasons, intuitions, and experiences, many of which could easily be criticized individually and some of which are not really communicable, that together point me in that direction. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (together with a deep-seated conviction that solipsism, the elephant in the room here, is false) is just the biggest piece.

FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Some people are Christians because they trust authority figures who tell them it's true.

When I was eleven, I thought about this (I'm not claiming to have been a smart kid, but rather the kind of weird kid who thought about stuff like this). I recited the Creed at Mass every week, so - did I believe this because I believed it, or because people in authority over me (parents, teachers, the society I lived in) taught me to believe it?

Yeah, I was Catholic, but if I'd been raised Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or - gasp! - Protestant, wouldn't I believe that too as the One True Truth? How could I know what I believed?

So I decided to do an experiment: for one week, I would live as if I didn't believe any of it. As if it was all false, and there was no God/gods. I would put my thinking that way.

I gave up about three days in, because I couldn't do it. It just didn't make sense to me. Yeah yeah, science - but I had seen the TV coverage of the live moon landing, after all, when I was six - dating myself here - and it was amazing, and for a flicker of a moment I had that same question: it was on the television but so were other programmes about space travel, and those were all fiction as everyone told me. I went out and looked at the moon, which I still remember was coming up full over the sea, and I couldn't see anything there (look, like I said, I never said I was a smart kid and I was only six) so how did I know this was real and not another one of those shows? In the end, I decided I had to take it on authority: the man on the television reporting on it for the Irish state broadcaster was someone I saw on news programmes, and those were real, and I trusted he wasn't a liar, so this was probably real too.

So if the guys who all go on about how they were nine and figured out religion was all codswallop and they challenged their school teacher who couldn't back it up or explain it (and everybody clapped) (okay, that was snide) are to be taken seriously as to why they are now atheists, then I think I have as much right to be taken seriously as to why I believe. It damn well isn't wish fulfilment, I can tell you that for nothing. I'd love to be able to settle down happily to "we live, we die, that's the end, there ain't no afterlife or gods or heaven or hell or reincarnation or nuthin', just sweet oblivion and the physical body decays back into the atoms out of which it was formed", but I can't.

I couldn't make the material universe work, is all. I realise now I was probably groping for some version of the Unmoved Mover/First Cause argument, but that's how it worked for me. Everything around me had a cause, and that cause was generally someone. Houses didn't just tumble together, they were built. So what built the world around me? Who built the world around me? And yes, Science, but that wasn't enough. EDIT: Evolution wasn't the problem, just in case anyone is thinking that. Evolution was never a problem, I learned the basics in Biology class in school when I was fourteen, taught by our science teacher who was the Reverend Mother of our convent school. So it's not the American version of Religion Versus Science, Round Umpteen, Seconds Out, no biting no gouging no hitting below the belt.

I could, I suppose, have found my way to some nice, rational, non-supernatural version of 'religion' which kept the Nice Ethical Principles about doing good and loving your neighbour, but that doesn't work for me. I can't have a religion without the supernatural, because that ends up just an Ethical Debating Society and at that point you may as well be honest and come out as an atheist.

When I read Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" and the part where, under the influence of her Greek teacher and her own resentment at the sacrifice of her sister Psyche, Orual imports a new Greek-inspired statue of the goddess Ungit and promotes the more 'philosophical' new high priest who will do away with the older, grubbier, blood sacrificial faith, and then there is the scene where the peasant woman prays before the old stone representing Ungit, all blood-splashed and shadowy, because that's more real, that's the kind of goddess who will listen and know the kind of woman she is - I recognised that part.

Maybe it's all blood and shadows and pain and sacrifice and grubby primitive superstitions of the ignorant, but: In the beginning was the Word. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

notaflatland FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago

So you made a great and very simple point that atheists all point out. "Yeah, I was Catholic, but if I'd been raised Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or - gasp! - Protestant, wouldn't I believe that too as the One True Truth? How could I know what I believed?"

That is true. You would feel the same way about any belief you were indoctrinated with before critical thinking set in. It is very hard to overcome. How can your early epiphany not still influence your thinking about your beliefs?

FarNearEverywhere notaflatland 1yr ago

Valid point, but (1) I did deliberately poke at it to see if that made a difference and (2) if "indoctrination" sets in before critical thinking, then the baby atheists of nine years old get no credit for "so I decided religion was all bullshit". If I'm indoctrinated at that age, so are they. Because 'science true, religion false' is a popular and acceptable belief, they get credit for finding out the truth. But they're just as indoctrinated about "well now don't sensible, intelligent people know it's all silly?" that I was about "this is true".

People who struggled with it, who say "I tried to hold on to my faith, I wanted to hold on, but I couldn't" - I can respect that. They've put in the work. The Dawkins style Baby Atheists who say "I was so smart at age nine I just knew it was bullshit", I don't respect.

I mean, it is prima facie obvious. There is Zero proof in all of human history of anything supernatural or god like. Why would anyone believe that kind of stuff unless tricked at a young age?

TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

Thanks for this post! It's excellent.

Hah well I can say that for most of my life I have absolutely been a caricature of the type of thinking laid out here.

This perspective really opened my eyes in terms of what I have been missing from the Christian ethos:

A lot of people have this unspoken idea that Christian ontology is essentially the same as materialist ontology, except that there is are extra entities which maybe don't follow the laws of physics, and one of them is "omnipotent" (whatever that means, maybe power level = infinity or something), and we call that one "God".

DuplexFields Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it. TheDag 1yr ago

I remember being nine (or so) and trying to figure my way through theology with my dad, with whom I had watched a great deal of Star Trek TNG. I started with "So, God is an entity-" and that's where my dad cut me off. He didn't like me using the word entity, because to him it was a fancy word for "thing" and God is not a thing.

My revelatory moment about God-as-reality came while thinking through the implications of the Trinity and the multi-omni-ness of God. Axiomatically, nothing came before God. Well, what about that very "beforeness"? Did causal sequence exist prior to God? Axiomatically no; so therefore causal sequence must either be a creation or an inseparable attribute of God. The same was true of logic; "before" God created anything, there were no things which weren't God; but "not" is logic, which means either there was a "time" before He invented logic where there was not even an implication of "not-God", or logic itself is a fundamental attribute of God.

These thoughts lead inexorably to the idea that every good and right choice is somehow tied to God on a level I can't apprehend with my merely physical senses, and that sin must be a terrible contagion indeed to even theorize it separates a small and fallible human from God forever... and that free will and consciousness are so important and glorious that it required the possibility (and resulted in the eventuality) of humans becoming so depraved that they would prefer Hell to Heaven.

eudemonist DuplexFields 1yr ago

My revelatory moment about God-as-reality came while thinking through the implications of the Trinity and the multi-omni-ness of God

SAME. More specifically, it was the realization that the term in the original text, Elohim, is plural.

therefore causal sequence must either be a creation or an inseparable attribute of God

Nail on head.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? 1yr ago

I appreciate the nuanced take and attempt to clarify your beliefs in a manner clearer to Rationalists and rat-adjacents.

Further, I wholeheartedly endorse the claim that rationality can be applied to any goal or belief system, that's what the orthogonality thesis is all about. There's nothing irrational about say, wanting to covert the universe into paperclips, and for all the insults I could hurl at a Paperclip Maximizer as it disassembled me for parts, irrational isn't one of them. It would only be so if it went about its goals in a counterproductive manner, or a grossly suboptimal one, such as, idk, building flawed Von Neumanns that make safety pins instead.

Thus, in principle, you can reconcile epistemic and instrumental rationality with religion, my point is that in practise it's about as sensible as Muslim apologists arguing that hijabs are feminist and empowering for women. Less gross hypocrisy or maybe even none on your end, of course, but the same issues apply.

If you end up in a situation where you are initialized with a prior of 1 in the existence of God/The Truth of Christianity, then you are perfectly rational in assuming all observed evidence in that light and then assuming any discrepancies or paradoxes arise from an incomplete understanding of the world.

It's still a deeply malign prior.

I don't know if the human brain, while strongly likely to be doing Bayesian Predictive Processing, is capable of having priors of literal one or zero. That being said, the religious seem close to the former.

All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified. We only use the more abstruse equations for GR over simple F=ma and other classical physics because in certain very important regimes, they justify the headache and predict the world with more accuracy.

As it stands, the world as it exists today is far better explained by assuming the universe works solely according to the laws of physics without any external intervention where anyone can see it.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything, but that isn't a blank cheque for believing in anything you feel like. The rational thing to do is remain agnostic on that regard, at least unless we end up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and yet no answers. The history of humanity is riddled with questions that seemed beyond the ability of empirical studies to explain, such as the elan vital, yet we have solved them, and Christian metaphysics is not a satisfactory explanation unless you start out with an unshakeable belief in it.

The existence of a Creator with the properties of Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnibenevolence need justification far more powerful than the word of some Middle Eastern randos several millennia ago, and it's such a shame that more objective evidence has been sorely lacking since we have omnipresent digital recording devices and randomized control studies.

Was Jesus a real historical character? Easily could have been, but that no more makes a difference than the next schizophrenic I treat who rambles about being the next prophet.

Perhaps the strong relationship between visions and speaking in tongues with something as prosaic as temporal lobe epilepsy should make the wise take a hint.

Your arguments are sound if and only if one assumes the truth of your faith as given and then works backward to justify everything else. When you scramble constantly with apologetics against all other evidence, the intelligent thing to do is consider whether or not the null hypothesis has a point!

The mere existence of complex maths or seeming paradoxes is no excuse for waving away far bigger ones with less reason to assume that the reason that the properties you ascribe to them are anything but a consequence of them being imaginary.

As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts. Until then, my sheer disdain for Him is made obviate by the fact that He's fictional.

Shame, because if prayer cured cancer or brought about post-scarcity, I'd be the busiest beaver in that regard. Beats going through med school and memorizing all these doses I tell ya.

Until that happens, I'm content to watch us make our own gods, not that they should be worshipped or programmed to demand it. Maybe Lucifer would be better served creating a Heaven on Earth instead of reigning in hell, at the very least we have the means of doing it ourselves.

ace self_made_human 1yr ago

Oh thank you for being the lone voice of reason on this page and explaining so well.

I was shocked when I found out how many people in my workplace were religious. (Not interested in doxxing myself, but it’s a place strongly selected on analytical thinking ability, though now that I think about it maybe not enough.) And now I guess I can be shocked at the purchase religious ideas find here. I had thought atheism thoroughly won the religion-vs-atheism wars of the 2000s, but I guess I was watching different screen from everyone else.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? ace 1yr ago

Despite my better judgement, I am still willing to enter into the old atheism versus religion debate on occasion haha. To the credit of the religious on the Motte, most of them are far better informed on both the actual tenets of their religion, as well as the ideas behind modern science or information theory, such that the arguments encompass fields that you don't seen on any old debate on Reddit. I would much rather argue with a Steelman than a Strawman, even if I'd prefer neither exist.

Despite the fact that number of people whose minds I have changed is ~0 (and vice versa, really, if I'm being honest), such debate helps keep me sharp and articulates intuitions I've built over the years in an adversarial environment. Certainly while I'm open to them expressing their beliefs, I am inevitably against leaving them critically unopposed.

I had thought atheism thoroughly won the religion-vs-atheism wars of the 2000s, but I guess I was watching different screen from everyone else.

I'm only barely old enough to see the tailwinds of that period, back when /r/Atheism was a default subreddit. I have little to opine other than what Scott has already written, that the Atheists won, in the sense that fundamentalist Christians were stopped from enforcing many of their more insane policies on the wider populace, but the movement was eventually subsumed into what we might current recognize as Wokism, which is a damn shame.

Frankly, humans are capable of astonishing feats of compartmentalization, likely an adaptive mechanism to put a ceiling on how bad a viral memeplex can be for the typical host. Leaving aside religion, the fact that my uncle, a microbiology professor, can believe fervently in homeopathy while otherwise being completely sane, would make me despair if it were not for the fact that humans have been mostly getting saner over time, even if we could be in a minor period of backpedaling on that front.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

If by chance you haven't read this, I strongly recommend it!

dovetailing self_made_human 1yr ago

I have, of course, a lot of disagreements with this comment, but in the spirit of explaining things rather than re-waging the Great Internet Atheism-vs-Religion Wars (I was a teenager 20 years ago; I ought to know better now) I wanted to focus on two things that are a bit more meta-level and more relevant specifically to rationality.

All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified.

There are two points to be made here. The first is that Occam's razor, the simplicity prior, and the particular formal version based on Kolmogorov complexity, are all assumptions, not inevitable consequences of logic. Probability theory tells you how to update your prior based on evidence (....if, somehow, you can know the probabilities of all your observations conditional on each of the potential hypotheses, which in this context is an unrealistically big ask); it can't tell you what your prior should be. A simplicity prior is not an unreasonable choice in many contexts, but it's (a) not actually practical for many things (do you know all possible hypotheses and their exact complexity?) and (b) it's not the only possible choice.

The second is that it seems likely to be impossible to even evaluate simplicity or conditional probabilities when you are dealing with radically different ontologies, and it's not at all clear that e.g. the claim that physics and the existing physical universe is the brute fact of reality is in any way simpler than the claim that a Person is. Certainly I'll grant that "the physical universe, but also God/supernatural/nonphysical stuff tacked on" is more complicated than pure materialism, but that's explicitly not what the alternative is.

An analogy for those who know about the demoscene: a long, intricate demo certainly looks more complicated than a random short clip on Youtube, but it is much simpler in an information-theory sense, being generated from a small executable. Given that we don't know any real equivalent of "the shortest possible code" for either a materialist or Theistic account of the reality, I don't think it's even in principal possible to judge the complexity of either.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything

This misses the point. There are certainly many problems that, when substituted for "the Hard Problem of Consciousness" here, would make this statement a valid criticism. For instance, if someone tried to argue that the fact that science can't account for Abiogenesis is a knock-down argument against materialism, this would be a good point. The fact that we have no good idea how abiogenesis could occur is some evidence against its occurring by natural means, but in the future new evidence or a better understanding of chemistry might turn things around, just as biochemistry did for the properties of organic life as it is now.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is another matter. The problem is not that current science can't explain it; the problem is that ontological materialism excludes consciousness (in the sense those of us talking about the Hard Problem mean) entirely. There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite a bit more certain that I exist than I am that the external world exists, let alone of any laws of physics or theories about what other things might or might not exist, simply for the reason I have direct, unmediated observation of the fact of my existence, which I don't have of physical things. Not to go full #DescartesWasRight here, but he's a lot more right about this than many people give him credit for.

To get at something of my frustration here, let me present a fictional dialogue between a normal person "Matt" and a person with a rather odd ontology, "Noah":

Noah: "The whole universe is just a number. Everything is just some digits or properties of this number. All is number!"

Matt: "But this rock isn't a number! It's not even the same sort of thing as a number! It's stuff, matter, not something abstract like a number."

Noah: "What do you mean? How do you know that stuff isn't just properties of a number. After all, you know that atoms can be counted, mass can be measured, positions can be located, as numbers. Numbers are everywhere. We can express everything about your rock as some numbers, and thus, of course, as digits in one Great Number which is the whole universe."

Matt: "Sure, numbers are useful for measuring things. But a rock isn't just its measurements -- it's made of stuff; it has actual existence."

Noah: "I don't know what you mean by 'actual existence', or 'stuff' or 'matter', and I don't think you do either. Sure, I'll grant that there are things about a rock that we don't know how to measure yet, so we don't fully know how it is part of the Great Number. But it's just a matter of time."

Matt: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

Whenever I talk to materialists about consciousness, I feel just like Matt talking to Noah. If you actually don't get it, I don't know what to say to you.

And this leads into some final thoughts which are connected to both of these. The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position. Frankly, the reason I'm not a solipsist is not that I have a good argument that it's false; rather, I just can't believe it -- I have an arational certainty -- generously, direct apprehension of a truth -- that solipsism is false and I'm not the only thing that exists.

And if we aren't rationally required to be solipsists, well, isn't that giving the whole game away in terms of trying to evaluate ontologies with the same tools one uses for day-to-day reasoning about more bounded questions?

(A more complete version of this comment would relate this to questions about model uncertainty and why, practically, 10^-9 is no more a "real" credence level than 0 is, but this comment is far too long already.)

notaflatland dovetailing 1yr ago

Consciousness isn't a hard problem. It is an emergent property of any brain with a large enough frontal and prefrontal cortex. It helps justify the existence of using the limited resources on a large brain because it helps certain living beings survive a bit better. Give someone enough brain damage in those areas or enough drugs and the "I" goes away.

fmaa dovetailing 1yr ago

I can just paste my reply to the previous post here I saw that used solipsism to defend religion: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.

To actually require that clarification in front of every single statement made by everyone is meaningless pedantry in the same category as requiring every subjective statement to start with "in my opinion".

Tenaz fmaa 1yr ago

The point is that Occam's Razor prefers solipsism above materialism, and therefore is not entirely reliable. Yes, we can assume solipsism is incorrect, and therefore we can assume Occam's Razor is incorrect (at least sometimes) too.

fmaa Tenaz 1yr ago

I guess it'd be more accurate to say that I'm not assuming it's incorrect, I'm conjecturing it. So prepend every bit of communication ever (for Boltzmann brains also include thoughts as communication between different mindstates across time) with "Conditional on solipsism being false,". This doesn't actually say anything about the accuracy of solipsism.

Though, for models of solipsism weaker than Boltzmann brains it's not in the least clear that Occam's Razor even prefers them. Conditional on thoughts being real and coherent across time, there actually being an inductive external reality is the simplest explanation for me experiencing one, as the vast majority of possible mindstates would not feature such experience.

Sure. Really, as explained by @dovetailing, it's not in the least clear what Occam's Razor prefers at all, when it comes to foundational assumptions about reality. Regardless I don't see the issue with using solipsism to prove that we shouldn't trust Occam's Razor overly much.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? dovetailing 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism.

I actually agree with everything you said up till this paragraph for what it's worth.

But my stance here is we don't know. It's not obvious to me that this is in fact true, for the same reason that people sincerely believed that the spark of life that gave beings motion was qualitatively different from "mere" physics. I reserve judgement till we have a GUT, or a Superintelligence of our own tells me otherwise. In the absence of understanding everything else perfectly, it seems like a far better stance to simply reserve judgement.

And once again, it really is no excuse to just choose any old ontology you feel like, especially when you consider more concrete variables like predictive accuracy and the like.

I'd go so far as to say that Christian metaphysics is no better at answering this. You lack a mechanistic explanation of how souls work, and a natural language description doesn't count even if the language seems simple enough.

The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position

I am aware of the existence of Boltzmann Brains, and it certainly throws a wrench in my certainty of anything really.

But as a merely practical matter, I treat it as moot till our decision theories or probability theories are up to the task. How do the ?infinite set of possibilities here line up with the other infinities in more reasons for solipsism that are Simulations, Multiverses and so on?

I have no clue. But practically, I have no way of finding out short of trying to kill myself, and I'm not that curious about it.

FarNearEverywhere self_made_human 1yr ago

I tend to wince at the use of terms like "randos" because oh sure we can't just take the word of some set of Middle Eastern randos, but we can absolutely take the word of a bunch of Eastern European randos, even if they got stuff wrong, because they are closer to what we like to think and believe.

God isn't complex. God is simple. But Absolute Divine Simplicity is very complex to understand. Just like quantum and the Higher Mathematics and the rest of the sciences which rest on a ground of "trust us, even if you have no way of approaching an understanding of what we're talking about; me and him and that guy over there understand it" 😀

-1

Hyperion FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago

You need complex math to describe Solomoff Induction. But it isn't some ineffable mystery. Same with Quantum mechanics. A mindless piece of silicon can compute the equations of quantum mechanics. The brightest theologians can't agree on what absolute divine simplicity even is.

dovetailing FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

To be fair, the notions of simplicity at play here are two different ones, so Divine Simplicity is, while not entirely irrelevant, a bit beside the point.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago

God isn't complex. God is simple

Oh not this again. No, just claiming this doesn't make it so.

I'm not sure I want to be giving lessons on Kolmogorov complexity and minimum signal length, but consider why the more mathematically or comp sci literate among the religious aren't making this argument.

It's not just that it's a difficult and finicky concept, it is, I only have a passing understanding of it.

To put it as simply as I can, imagine you're trying to watch the Titanic, or rather send someone a copy. There are a lot of tricks involved in shrinking the size of a video so it can be sent more easily, but one of the more questionable things you can do is to send someone a very small file, that by itself seems like gibberish, but if they have a very complex video watching software, it can interpret it as the movie using information they already have. Similarly, you could also send a large file to a small piece of software and get the same result. However you will quickly find that trying to make both small doesn't work, you'll find that in both theory and practise, trying to shrink things further requires you to severely degrade the quality of the video itself over all else.

Or perhaps the person has already seen the movie and has a vivid imagination, then you can tell them "watch The Titanic in your head" and they can do just that. In this case, the data about the movie primarily exists in their brain.

The point of this analogy is that just because something sounds "simple" or "complex" to us in colloquial speech, doesn't mean it is is so in reference to the more rigorous and mathematical definitions I'm employing.

Maybe the word "God" sounds super simple to you, but your brain is buzzing with enormous amounts of context about what it means and implies, including the usual caveats about what it doesn't actually mean what it clearly implies, such as an all powerful and all loving deity letting evil of any form exist.

So the complexity is being smuggled in, like some wily pirate chopping a video up into multiple parts so they can innocently look at any one when asked and claim it's far too simple to be a Blu-ray rip of a copyrighted movie.

I'm thinking of the likes of Dawkins who liked to argue about how things get more complex over time; we evolved from simple organisms to the complex system that is a human being. But if God is much greater than humans, He must be even more complex. So how did this complex entity exist in the very beginning of the universe? Checkmate, believers!

And that's where Divine Simplicity comes in. God is not an evolved being or a more complicated version of a human or a superintelligence like AI or any other physical model of a thing in the material universe. God does not have moving parts. God is spirit.

iprayiam3 self_made_human 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts.

I've heard this sentiment before, and I think Tony Robinson has a bit about this. My question is, would you really? I get that this sentiment is meant to emphaisize the incredible apparent irreconcilability between a Good God and the suffering in the world, which in turn is evidence against the former.

But, as someone on the other side of the belief equation, it screams emotionalism compromising your sense of 'rational' skepticism.

Like I'd take the atheism/agnosticism of someone more seriously who said something like:

"If faced irrefutably with God, I'd be incredibly humbled! My very strong prior against Him would be shattered, and I'd have to acknowedge that a significant part or more of my epistemological model led me astray. I'd like to have that clarified before making any further decisions. Consequently, it's very difficult for me to predict how I'd approach any other pre-existing greivance past that epistemic event horizon."

In other words, if you were faced with being absolutely wrong about your agnosticism, you really wouldn't stop for an instant, temper your contempt for a moment, to scratch the possibility that your view of the problem of evil, of theodicy, was also incomplete?

To be certain that in the event you are wrong about God's existance, you'd simply move down to your next argument - grievance against His supposed benevolence, comes off as a tell against epistemic hygeine.

TLDR; I am always puzzled by people angry at a god they don't believe in. I think the anger and disbelief undermine eachother.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? iprayiam3 1yr ago

It's right there dude.

iprayiam3 self_made_human 1yr ago

I'm sorry, is this a different take on our initial exchange? I thought we already shared our mutual points fair enough.

It's me being mildly exasperated that you even asked in the first place, since the answer was in fact in the original text.

I agree we've otherwise said our peace.

FarNearEverywhere iprayiam3 1yr ago

That's the President Jed moment from "The West Wing", right? He's in a church (Protestant, I'm presuming hard here because even though it's set up as liturgical there's no cross, much less a crucifix, on the wall) and waffling away about how he's done all this great shit and that doesn't buy him good things, so to hell with God.

And I'm thinking "Yeah, this is not written by a Christian" (even though Martin Sheen gives a great performance). It's very, very telling that the only things we see are the abstract stained glass, because if he's standing in front of a crucifix with the image of the dying Saviour, then his "I kept all the rules, I deserve that bad things never happen to me, we had a deal!" rant is seen for the dogshit it is.

I can well believe Jed went to school to the Jesuits, but even they would have taught him that "you don't make that bargain with God, just going along as 'I'm a good guy, I never did anything bad' is not enough, not nearly enough, and the thing that is going to happen to you is the world will hate and persecute you for being faithful to Christ".

"I was the Golden Boy all my life, I succeeded at school and then afterwards, I made it all the way in politics! I'm President of the United States, I got a ton of liberal policies passed, I deserve the good life!" is answered by the Good Friday Reproaches.

For your sake I scourged your captors and their firstborn sons, but you brought your scourges down on me.
My people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me!

I will point to Yudkowsky claiming many times over that rationality and emotions aren't necessarily mutually incompatible.

Maybe I wouldn't kick such an Eldritch horror from beyond time and space in the nuts, perhaps because it doesn't have one, but I am sorely tempted at times to do so for the mere humans running cover for its actions.

In other words, if you were faced with being absolutely wrong about your agnosticism, you really wouldn't stop for an istant, temper your contempt for a moment, to scratch the possibility your view of the problem of evil, of theodicy, was also incomplete?

Certainly. I would still expect very good answers for all the pain and suffering I've personally endured and on behalf of all others.

Things I might settle for? An answer to theodicy I guess, or a signed disclaimer from my past self acknowledging what the fuck I was putting myself through after a veil of ignorance.

That doesn't change that I find the current proposals made by the religious morally outrageous to the max, claiming that things are working as intended is one of the biggest hurdles to endeavors to making them better. Religious people are consistently some of the biggest hurdles to technological innovation and human advancement I've had the displeasure of seeing, not that they hold sole claim to that dubious distinction. If you're tempted to disagree from your own emotions, then pray tell how Christians came around on IVF.

I am always puzzled by people angry at a god they don't believe in. I think the anger and disbelief undermine eachother.

The latter is true. I'm not actually currently angry at something I don't believe exists. It's in the scenario where I'm proven wrong that the boiling hatred arises, even if I wouldn't claim to not be amenable to explanations.

If you're tempted to disagree from your own emotions, then pray tell how Christians came around on IVF.

Oh, Catholicism certainly hasn't come around on that. I am absolutely one of those who welcome hurdle to your technological and human advancement both from within and outside of my Christian faith. I fully understand the animosity toward the religious from your point of view, and of course I understand the metaphorical (and cathartic) language about picking a bone with a god you don't believe in; I simply wanted ot point out that I still find it an offputting frame from the other side (though of course you're not appealing to someone like me when saying it). It's a sentiment meant for one's own side, I suppose.

Oh, Catholicism certainly hasn't come around on that.

I stand corrected, not that it does anything good for my opinion of said religion.

Hmm.. I suppose losing one's monopoly on potential virgin births has gotta suck.

If IVF can produce virgin birth (that is, parthenogenesis in humans with no sperm cells or other means of conjoining nuclei) then I'm very impressed, but it's not gonna be supernatural.

We may be filthy wafflers, but at least we're consistent on waffling!

There is no such thing a a "supernatural" event. So you've got nothing to worry about. There is nothing outside nature.

That still tells me nothing about "is there a soul? does it persist after death? what happens after death?" 'There is nothing outside nature' does not preclude 'souls exist'.

Yes it does. However you define it, nothing of "you" persists after death, except your raw materials.

Southkraut A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. FarNearEverywhere 1yr ago

Define Soul.

virgin birth

For certain widely accepted definitions of virgin.

Oh, don't remind me of the PC re-definition (or maybe I mean SJ re-definition, it was a little time back when I saw it going around, and you know how fast acceptable terms mutate in progressivism) of "virgin".

To boil it down, men can't be virgins, and "virgin" doesn't mean "never had sex", it just means "unmarried woman".

There is some reason for that but my eyes are automatically rolling so hard in their sockets that I can't bring myself to remember what the reason was.

ControlsFreak self_made_human 1yr ago

if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts. Until then, my sheer disdain for Him

Do you hold it as a general belief that such a Creator could not create a physical universe where even a single bad thing happens? Which part of your materialism or rationalism does that belief come from?

Hyperion ControlsFreak 1yr ago

It doesn't confirm materialism and rationalism are correct, only that the fact the Creator is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. He can be two, but not all three. If you want to be a Spinozan and just call the materialistic universe God, be my guest. It's a hypothesis that predicts nothing and everything.

ControlsFreak Hyperion 1yr ago

I did not ask whether it confirmed that materialism and rationalism are correct. I asked which part of your materialism and rationalism the conclusion that an Omnibenevolent loving Creator could not create a physical universe where even a single bad thing happens came from.

sun_the_second ControlsFreak 1yr ago

Pretty far goalpost movement from "no horrible viruses/genetic diseases" to "not a single bad thing".

Just don't create the real bad non-fundamental shit, bro.

ControlsFreak sun_the_second 1yr ago

Not a goalpost shift at all. Instead, I'm just trying to fill in the details of the argument and trying to figure out where his goalposts are. There could be other things in the middle. Like, perhaps you're proposing:

Ichthyosis vulgaris exists.
??? [something coming from reality]
Such a Creator could not create a physical universe where "real bad non-fundamental shit" exists, however that term in quotes is defined in the previous premises.
Therefore, the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it.

I think you still have some question marks to fill in. But thanks for starting to specify where you think the goalposts should be. We didn't even have that before.

I don't see what's so complicated about "ichtyosis' existence is obviously (to humans) bad (for humans) and doesn't have any visible positives (for humans), like 'necessary for the ecosystem' or whatever. Theists, why don't you show why your omnibenevolent God that allegedly prioritizes humans allows ichtyosis to exist?".

(If God doesn't prioritize humans then let the bacteria worship him, we're clearly outvoted.)

Is that argument "not coming from reality"? Where else is it coming from, then?

Because the above commenters said "cannot". They made a claim. An impossibility theorem. Only, they actually didn't say anything about how it's supposed to work. How's this impossibility theorem supposed to work?

Eetan Hyperion 1yr ago

It doesn't confirm materialism and rationalism are correct, only that the fact the Creator is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. He can be two, but not all three.

Triple-omni God is construct of Greek philosophy and explicitly unbiblical idea.

No idea why Christians decided to adopt it as cornerstone of their theology.

fmaa Hyperion 1yr ago

I'd say that the usual theodicy formulation is extremely overstated, and in fact the observed universe is incompatible with a god that's just kinda potent, benevolent and scient. It is very easy to imagine limited supernatural powers falling well short of omni-anything which could vastly improve the world.

Unsurprisingly, just about the only sensible theodicy I've seen is Scott's Answer to Job, and that's a creative writing exercise, not an attempt to explain the world. Though he does now have a link to actual apologetics using this line of reasoning.

Hyperion fmaa 1yr ago

Sure, let's all worship the true prophet Zoroaster. It was the Orthodox Christians who took this to far.

Hell, even before(and after) Zoroaster, who the Judeans and then Christians stole so much of their theology and cosmology, various pagan and animistic faiths allowed for a world constructed by fickle gods and spirits, not much different from men, except in form and grandeur.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? ControlsFreak 1yr ago

Not in the least. My beef is with the claim of omnibenevolence when reality demonstrates that is categorically untrue.

It doesn't even align with such an entity at least being kind, what exactly did a newborn infant do to deserve it?

The universe aligns more with utter apathy than either love or hatred.

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour self_made_human 1yr ago

If your prior is set at .75%, or .6%, or .50000001%, what changes? You still have to make sense of an incomprehensibly vast dataset based on limited information. You still have to assign bespoke weights to any given piece of evidence, based on bespoke assessments of value and mangitude.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? FCfromSSC 1yr ago

The reason 1 and 0 are bad ideas because of Bayesian updates work, 1 implies infinite certainty, and 0 implies infinite disbelief. When you contend with a merely finite amount of evidence, no matter how vast it is, it moves the needle not one inch.

For any other values, at least in theory, a sufficient amount of evidence makes two entities with different priors converge. If they're ideal Bayesian agents, then they can just talk to each other and end up at the same spot by the Aumann Agreement Theorem, not that I can particularly follow the latter myself. The former is robustly true.

As for how that works in human neurology? No clue. But we know that LLMs initialized from random weights manage it, something to do with them being biased for simplicity in their world models, and that seems to work in practise. Presumably humans do something similar too, since we have some mechanism for teasing out useful ontologies, and it doesn't have to be particularly complex, since random noise can be coaxed there with simple algorithms.

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour self_made_human 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

...Sorry, I didn't mean to post that when I did, but since you replied, I'll undelete it.

The reason 1 and 0 are bad ideas because of Bayesian updates work, 1 implies infinite certainty, and 0 implies infinite disbelief.

Another way to phrase this would be that 1 and 0 represent bedrock commitment to an axiom or principle. What should my prior be that it's a good idea to cheat on my wife, or that committing murder for sport is a bad idea? Do you think sufficient evidence exists to preclude decimal notation for either question? Do you think it is beneficial to leave these as routinely-updated open questions throughout one's life?

It seems to me that there are no shortage of instances where, even if the evidence is insufficient to support a prior anywhere near 0 or 1 on a question, life requires us to abandon the decimals in favor of one integer or the other. Would you disagree?

Put another way, there is a difference between questions of what is, and questions of what we will do. Certainty is a detriment to the former and a benefit to the later, and it is simply not the case that either of the two are optional. Ideally, one lowers one's priors when figuring out the truth of things, makes a decision, and then raises one's priors when executing that decision, with the lowering and the raising being proportional to the importance of the question. But this is the problem: how do you distinguish people who've committed to a decision arrived at with imperfect knowledge from people who are incapable of examining the nature of the decision in the first place?

For any other values, at least in theory, a sufficient amount of evidence makes two entities with different priors converge.

In real life, is this effect strong enough to allow you to differentiate between a prior set at 1 before evidence, versus a prior arriving at .50001 after evidence? That is to say, do you believe you can rigorously differentiate between people who are not engaging in good faith, versus people who are engaging in good faith but are not convinced by your arguments?

The former is robustly true.

...And entirely irrelevant to actual human behavior, no? While evidence should do this, it very, very rarely does so, and you should be able to observe from the times that it has not done so for you yourself that the problem is not just people ignoring evidence, but that the effect, while real, is too weak to overmatch other influences in any but the most advantageous circumstances. Human reason is not deterministic in any practical sense, and this fact can be readily discerned by anyone willing to engage in a modest amount of introspection.

It seems to me that framing disagreement in terms of strength of priors in decimal notation, like Utilitarian calculus, is an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. I don't believe you or anyone else can rigorously assign a prior to even the first decimal place for a real-world question of appreciable complexity, like, say, who the next president is going to be.

Presumably humans do something similar too, since we have some mechanism for teasing out useful ontologies, and it doesn't have to be particularly complex, since random noise can be coaxed there with simple algorithms.

What useful predictions does this theory allow you to make?

What should my prior be that it's a good idea to cheat on my wife, or that committing murder for sport is a bad idea? Do you think sufficient evidence exists to preclude decimal notation for either question? Do you think it is beneficial to leave these as routinely-updated open questions throughout one's life?

People regularly cheat on their wives, and at least some people commit murder for the thrill of it, leaving aside if it's a good idea.

While it would be pretentious to put too many decimal points on any reply here, I can confidently say that the "carefully" considered answer to both are sub 1%, to the point that the expected value of information from crunching it more explicitly is lackluster to say the least. Of course, I have little intrinsic desire to do each, if someone cared more they should spend more time considering it.

In real life, is this effect strong enough to allow you to differentiate between a prior set at 1 before evidence, versus a prior arriving at .50001 after evidence?

Yes? I mean, can you claim you've literally never seen anyone change their mind? People can and do express confidence levels, and there has been considerably research that shows that when someone says something is "very likely" or "unlikely", that correlates to a numerical probability even if it's noisy.

If I submit someone convincing evidence and they don't even deign to consider it or, or outright admit nothing can sway them, then I have no qualms about declaring them zealots who are immune to evidence against their claims. This is not the same as normative claims which can't be represented by priors, just utility functions, but religion as practised or preach isn't just normative, even if I think the norms in question are stupid.

I've had one person here, @Meriadoc, admit that there's nothing I or anyone, even with a trillion dollars in funding, including more funding to counter-investigate our claims, can do to change his mind regarding the truth of Mormonism. If that's not a stuck prior at 1, I don't know what is!

I don't believe you or anyone else can rigorously assign a prior to even the first decimal place for a real-world question of appreciable complexity, like, say, who the next president is going to be.

You don't see me doing that, at least unless the magnitude of the prior is significantly smaller than 1%, and even then I consciously refrain from dumb statements like claiming I only think there's a 0.0000000001% chance something is true, because the odds of me simply being insane are higher.

I usually express myself along the lines of ~10% margins, and I have empirical evidence that I am a well calibrated person, the last time I took a test that explicitly tested it, it was almost perfect from the entire range of 0-100%, in 10% buckets. So I can easily say that I'm 50-70% sure of a proposition and know that means something, and I don't claim I'm 55.67% sure.

A newborn baby, confronted with a theoretically infinite number of explanations and world models for all the enormous amounts of evidence they're bombarded with, almost always swiftly and inevitably develops complex ontologies like object permanence, and even an understanding of the classical laws of motion.

You've previously claimed that the sheer difficulty of grappling with near infinite ways of interpreting any given sample of information precludes us from being certain about anything, but babies and the simple algorithms underling LLMs such as GPT-4 alike don't give a shit, if there's signal in the noise they'll find it.

The Simplicity Prior, or an applied form of Occam's Razor, works so well in practice that I have no qualms about relying on it.

Tenaz self_made_human 1yr ago

Here's what I said:

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.

You didn't mention any funding for counter-investigation; if you had I probably would answer differently.

self_made_human Kai su, teknon? Tenaz 1yr ago

Hmm, I could have sworn I did somewhere sometime, but maybe it was all in my head. Either way, apologies for being incorrect here.

reality demonstrates

What part of reality demonstrates it? Existence of ichthyosis vulgaris is a brute fact, sure. But then what? What is the next piece of reasoning? Reality provides some standard or something that somehow says that this brute fact has some implication? How are you getting to your conclusion?

That the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it?

That is such a profoundly obvious takeaway I don't see how you miss it. It it's genuinely new to you, it's the problem of theodicy if one wants to use complex terminology for no good reason.

How does that follow from something in reality? Like, fill in the details for me.

Ichthyosis vulgaris exists.
??? [something coming from reality]
Therefore, the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it.

Ichythosis Bad.*

God Good. God Strong.

How God Let Bad Thing Happen? Ugg no understand. Why other Uggs claim God Good as well as Strong If God No Help Innocent Baby?

*citation not needed

If my concern is genuinely new to you, it's the problem of non sequitur if one wants to use complex terminology for no good reason. But yeah, sorry Ugg. We have developed thousands of years of knowledge in how reasoning works, and your argument simply isn't persuasive. It's hardly even an argument. It's just mood affiliation. Ugg's going to have to catch up with the times and figure out how to make a proper argument.

-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy

Not only is it an argument, it's a valid one that's been grappled with by theologians for millennia. I think it's a waste of the time in the context of the Abrahamic God, who can't be blamed for it by the simple logic that it doesn't exist.

As for whether it's persuasive to you, I can only shrug, and say you're potentially being obtuse or simply can't follow a clear argument.

More comments

dovetailing 1yr ago

6 Rituals and Sacraments

Finally we come to what might be the main point of @TheDag's original question, which is that, frankly, rituals seem irrational. Why should one make the sign of the cross here, or bow there? Why does the priest pray the epiclesis ("Make this bread the Precious Body of Thy Christ")? Doesn't that all seem...well...superstitious? Definitely not reasonable? Like, what is it doing?

There are two easy answers, both of them wrong. The first is that it is, or is attempting to be, magic. That the sign of the cross wards off evil for no particular reason, like a vampire. That the priest pronouncing the magic words is what makes the Eucharist transform. That would, indeed, be superstition, and the Church is at pains to make clear that, while miracles may occur in such rituals (reliably do, in the case of the Sacraments), it is not the ritual that effects a miracle, nor that a failure to pronounce the proper words exactly or make the proper motions nullifies it. These rituals are not enacted to do magic or to attempt to manipulate God. (This may not be true of all religions and rituals, but it is true of Christianity.)

The other wrong answer is that rituals are there as a sort of human bonding experience, that the content is irrelevant and the impact purely social. This is, it seems, a common anthropological story, and it's true that there are a lot of purely social rituals in the world. But this is not the point of religious ritual, and if you are just seeking social bonding, you will miss something important.

The theology of sacraments in particular is a giant can of worms, so I'll leave that aside and focus on something smaller. In the course of the liturgy, the people will make the sign of the cross, bow, and (on weekdays and in Lent) make prostrations. Why? None of these is magic, and they seem... contingent, perhaps? Arbitrary? Why this ritual and not another, why now and not then?

To an extent there is something arbitrary about the specifics. But there is something more than that, and it comes down to symbolism. The sign of the cross is a symbol of prayer, and of faith in Christ (hence the sign of the cross), so for me it becomes prayer and an affirmation of that faith. Thus I make the sign of the cross during the litany to participate in the prayer, or even when I am alone, at home, to make a wordless prayer. Bowing is a sign of reverence; thus when I bow I not only display appropriate reverence, but orient my emotions and intentions toward reverence. That is, the point of the rituals is not how they affect God, but how they affect our attitude toward God and others.

When seen in this light, the rituals are not irrational behavior, but a deliberate way of orienting ourselves. And this is one reason they can be healing, because giving oneself the right attitudes influences everything else.

There's a part of the Liturgy, common in east and west, called the sursum corda, in which the following dialogue takes place between the priest and the people:

Priest: Lift up your hearts.

People: We lift them up to the Lord.

Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

People: It is meet and right (in the Byzantine rite, this sentence continues "...to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided." -- my understanding is that this is a later theological elaboration to the original rite)

Here there is a goal: to "lift up hearts" (i.e. to put oneself in a reverential and contemplative orientation to God), to give thanks to God, to worship God. And the means for that goal is this very call-and-response ritual that lays out the goal, and, as it says, this is appropriate ("meet and right"). The whole Liturgy is full of things like this -- the cherubic hymn with the words "[let us...] now lay aside all earthly cares", the litanies with "Let us pray to the Lord" -- "Lord have mercy".

Why does this work? That's a question about human psychology, and I don't know the answer, but it does, and in that light it's no less rational than talk therapy or being polite to dinner guests or any number of other things people do.

7 Final Thoughts

This turned out to be longer and more wide-ranging than I'd initially intended, and I'm sure will invite a lot of disagreement. I'm aware that I didn't do a lot of "prove this is rational/true" work above; even if that were possible to do to everyone's satisfaction, this essay is already long enough. I intend to interact with any comments in the same way -- to explain and lay out a way of thinking, not to argue that everyone else should accept it. I totally think they should, but, in line with my thoughts above, I don't believe that I've offered sufficient evidence to persuade most of you to become Christians, and I don't think that my words-on-a-screen could, unless you're most of the way there anyway.

FarNearEverywhere dovetailing 1yr ago

Ooh, the sacraments and sacramentals! I know the Church Fathers have written on these and on things like "why do we make the sign of the Cross?"

Here's excerpts from something I wrote back in 2012, talking about Catholic practices to Evangelical and derived therefrom people on a now-defunct website:

The point of all the discursiveness about salt and ashes and oil and pieces of cloth and beads and bending and kneeling and saying certain words and performing certain gestures and hanging up bits of vegetation and scattering water around? It’s because Christianity is a densely material faith and under our worldview, the world is drenched in the supernatural. To quote from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem we learned in school, “ The world is charged with the grandeur of God./It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”. The superstitious and even pseudo-pagan elements witness to this; not that they represent a smuggling in of the old practices to be continued beneath the cover of a whitewashed routine, but the recognition that the good things of life – children, crops, rain, light, protection from ills, health and growth of creatures as well as persons – were indeed good, and that now we know the true Author and Giver of all this, we can continue to render thanks. St. Paul did not overthrow the altar to the unknown god or call the Athenians deluded idiots, he used it as a springboard to teach them that what they were seeking, though they did not know it, was here already: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

...Every year a debunking under the guise of new research to reassure us that the inexplicable entangling of God with humanity is not so, but we have the reins in our own hand and the heavens remain unstained, lofty and distant until we – in our transcended forms as immaterial intelligences housed in technology not these fleshy shells – bestir ourselves to claim them.

But we superstitious ones are left here, in the dust of the desert, clinging not to symbols or weightless words but to real chunks excavated out of the world around us and handed to us by the wounded hands of the Lord we knew and laid in the tomb and now see in His own true flesh before us: bread and fish; salt, ashes, leaves, oil, water, candles, fire, all things to wear and eat and smear on our heads and sprinkle on our possessions as we bow, kneel, rise up, lie down, sing, call, as we plod on our own, weary, tired feet on the sand and stones, until up ahead, over the brow of the hill, look – the light of the dawn! So far to go still, but now no longer in the darkness.

TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra dovetailing 1yr ago

Let our mouths be filled with Your praise, O Lord, that we may sing of Your glory.

This is my favorite part of the liturgy. I think it also exemplifies what you're trying to say!

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