tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20857944927306429862024-03-14T05:19:25.535-07:00The Thoughtful AtheistAn honest look at the strengths and weaknesses of Atheism and Christianity, from a Christian-turned-Atheist giving Christianity one more shotJakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-15178365426115236712012-12-27T18:01:00.001-08:002012-12-27T18:02:43.546-08:00Reductionism<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>**Note: I recently participated in the
<a href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/" target="_blank">National Novel Writing Month</a>, and this post is an adaptation of a
chapter from that project, so it doesn't quite read like a standard
post. A more technical summary of reductionism can be found on Less
Wrong's <a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_(sequence)" target="_blank">reductionism sequence</a>, and specifically <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/on/reductionism/" target="_blank">this page</a>.**</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Plenty of materials have unique
<i>properties</i>, but they're not <i>fundamentally unique</i>. The
unique properties are traceable back to small differences in the
underlying arrangement of matter- number of valence electrons in the
outermost shell, or atomic weight, or electronegativity, etc. But
the same <i>structure</i> is underpinning all of it. Materials
aren't fundamentally complex, they're fundamentally simple- made up
of electrons, neutrons, and protons. That's it.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Reality isn't fractal; the huge
differences we see on the macro level don't translate to huge
differences on the atomic level. You can zoom in farther and
farther, and eventually you come to a level where everything is made
out of the same basic <i>stuff</i>, and it's just the arrangement of
that stuff that makes all the difference.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Thoughts and desires aren't
fundamentally complex either. Sure, they're big and complicated at a
macro level, but if you zoom in far enough, it's all electrical
charges running around in your brain. There's no substance to them,
no form, except that our bodies- our hardware- interpret them to mean
something. Thoughts aren't real things outside of the environment of
your own brain. Humans are really good at interpreting the thoughts
of other humans because we share that <i>context</i>- our brains know
about thoughts because our brains <i>have</i> thoughts. But there
isn't some 'thought' form that <i>actually exists in physical
reality.</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Consider the following thought
experiment: you write the word 'blue' on a piece of paper, and when
you place a rock down on the paper, the rock turns blue. Then, if
you put the rock down on another paper with the word 'green' written
on it, the rock turns green. What would this experimental result
mean for your belief system?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
For me, it would utterly destroy my
belief system, because this result is <i>fundamentally absurd</i>.
The words 'blue' and 'green' <i>don't actually mean anything</i> on
their own. <i>Green</i> and <i>blue</i> are fundamental things, but
the <i>words</i> 'green' and 'blue' aren't. From the rock's point of
view- I can't believe I just said that, since rocks obviously have no
point of view- they're just a collection of ink molecules spread out
over the paper's surface. They only mean something in the <i>context</i>
of the language they're written in- only people who read and speak
english would know what those words meant.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
If we saw this experimental result,
there's only three possibilities I could think of to explain it.
Either the rock <i>does</i> speak english, or someone who speaks
english is controlling the rock, or 'green' and 'blue' are real
things. Fundamental things. Things on which the laws of nature act.
Obviously the words 'green' and 'blue' aren't real things outside of
the english language, but thoughts...
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
And that's why religion is defeated
by reductionism. Because if what religion claims is true, then
thoughts are something <i>other</i> than neurons firing. And if
<i>that's</i> true, then the brain is just an interface for something
much bigger, much more complex. It's just a piece of machinery that
interprets the <i>form</i> of thoughts into electrical signals
capable of controlling material bodies.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Now you might ask, what's so wrong
with that? Isn't that what people mean when they talk about souls?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
Well, that's <i>not</i> <i>actually
how brains work</i>. If you damage one part of the brain, the victim
is left unable to speak. If you damage another, he falls asleep
without warning. If you stimulate another part with electrodes, the
test subject literally becomes a sociopath, no longer hindered by
moral attachments. In the real world, the brain affects thoughts,
not the other way around. It's not that the brain is some conduit
that allows thoughts through, and brain damage means those thoughts
come through muddled or somehow less clear. It's that damaging the
brain fundamentally alters those thoughts. It alters the <i>way</i>
we think, not just the output. Sociopaths aren't just outputting
actions as if they have no conscience, they're <i>thinking</i> and<i>
making decisions</i> as if their conscience doesn't exist.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
More fundamentally, physics only
acts on particles, not on forms. Physics doesn't care that you've
assembled the particles into the shape of an airplane- it just goes
ahead and applies gravity, strong force, weak force, and
electromagnetism to each and every particle, and calculates the
interaction of each particle with each neighboring particle, and the
result is a solid object that flies through the air if you go fast
enough. The form is important to us, but it's not important to
physics.
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
But even if the soul was a thing,
and even if the brain was acting purely as an interface between the
mysterious soul and the physical world, we still have a problem.
We've now posited the existence of a fundamentally complex thing-
either that, or we're positing some simple “soulitrons” that
combine to make up a soul. But the whole reason we wanted to invoke
a soul in the first place was so that we could get away from the idea
that all humans are is a complex arrangement of simple things! If
we're willing to say souls are complex groups of soulitrons, then why
aren't we willing to say that human behavior is better explained as
being complex groups of electrons, protons, and neutrons?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
At this point, the religious may
raise an objection: I've already said that's it's possible someone
who speaks english is controlling the metaphorical rock. What about
God? Surely you can't rule out the mystery of God as the explanation
of a soul?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.07in;">
There's really two problems with
this. First, <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_questions/" target="_blank">mysterious answers to mysterious questions</a> simply
aren't <i>helpful</i>. And second, now we're positing God as a
fundamentally complex thing. What is God made of? Goditrons? God
is infinitely more complex than we are. We can't posit God as a
“necessary being” as a solution to the fundamental complexity problem- or, notably, the first mover problem- because the idea of God is way more complicated than, well, pretty
much any other explanation.</div>
Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-70546458233734449862012-10-29T23:57:00.001-07:002012-10-29T23:57:57.435-07:00Bowing Out UngracefullyIf you look at the blog archive, it's pretty clear my blogging has lost steam. Part of that is time constraints, part of it is laziness, and part of it is that I don't feel like I really have anything that pressing to write. I think I've worked through most of the major areas that have troubled me (at least to my own satisfaction). Moreover, I've written down most of my important thoughts for future reference, which was a huge part of my goal here. <br />
<br />
I've said in the past, I don't particularly <i>like </i>philosophy, I just care about it because <i>I think it matters</i>. I think I've reached a point where I'm pretty sure I've got (a good approximation of) the right answer- at least, confident enough that I'm not going to spend all my free time on philosophy anymore. I've still got a backlog of 50 or so books to read (almost done with "Four Witnesses", "The Republic" up next), which I intend to keep making my way through.<br />
<br />
I may still post occasionally, and I'll for sure hang around other people's philosophy blogs- because those <i>are</i> interesting- but for posterity, if I never post again, it's not because I lost interest or had some horrible accident. It's because I reached a conclusion. I'm pretty sure Atheism is true (specifically, materialistic reductionism)<br />
<br />
That's it. Thanks to those that took the time to engage with me here- Jennifer, Ray, Leah, etc- many of you helped me along a great deal.<br />
<br />Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-21240354636766734212012-08-20T23:54:00.000-07:002012-08-20T23:54:17.224-07:00Buddhism, Part 1As part of my investigation into religion, I decided several months ago that it made a lot of sense to investigate religions <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/problem-of-geography.html" target="_blank">other than the one I happened to be born into</a>. As part of that effort, a few months back I did some studying on Buddhism, and never got around to formally writing up my thoughts, so here goes.<br />
<br />
The book I read was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Buddha-Taught-Expanded-Dhammapada/dp/0802130313/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345484138&sr=8-1&keywords=what+the+buddha+taught" target="_blank">What the Buddha Taught</a>, and I was really struck by two things. First, Buddhism seems to get right all the things Christianity gets wrong, but get wrong all the things Christianity gets right. Second, even after making an effort to understand it, I still find myself rejecting Buddhism not just as wrong, but as self-evidently absurd (and this <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/07/stargate-epistemology.html" target="_blank">concerns me greatly</a>). I'll talk about this second point more in my next post, but for now, I want to deal with the first point.<br />
<br />
<div>
For those unacquainted with Buddhism, I would definitely recommend reading the book yourself. It's quite short (less than 100 pages), and even has some cool pictures of Buddha statues. A final word of caution, my analysis here is working off of a single book (which itself is really more of a summary) written by one guy, so I'm sure I've still got plenty of misconceptions. But if misconceptions stopped us from making authoritative-sounding claims, all of Congress would be out of a job. Heyo!</div>
<br />
<strong>What Buddhism gets right and Christianity gets wrong</strong><br />
<br />
Buddhism has this wonderful view of how to pursue truth that's about 2300 years ahead of its time. It rejects authority in the forms of Faith and Tradition, and instead exhorts the follower to "come and see" rather than "come and believe". It is a prescription for arriving at your own knowledge, finding Truth for yourself, rather than being told what's true by a religious teacher. It's really a fundamental rejection of Authority in favor of Truth, which carries with it the implicit assumption that Authority and Truth are different things. The Christian basically claims that Authority and Truth are one and the same- that anything that has Authority is wholly and completely true (usually either the Church or the Bible, depending on the denomination). But I don't think anyone reasonable could deny that people in the past have taken action based on these Authorities and have been <em>wrong</em>. The Church was responsible for the crusades, and the Bible has had to be reinterpreted several times, notably to disallow slavery and to allow the equal social standing of women, just to name a few. So while the Christian may hold that the <i>ideal</i> Church or the <i>properly interpreted</i> Bible is categorically true, the Buddhist seems to have the weight of history on their side- it's incredibly unlikely that all the past believers of a religion have been wrong, but all the current ones are right, particularly since we are taught our religion by all those wrong-headed believers from the past.<br />
<br />
Buddhism absolutely prohibits violence in it's name- you are not to make others believe, but only to offer them Truth that they may have the chance to seek more of it if they so choose. Buddhism, seemingly unique amongst all religions, has spread through peace. There is, as always, <a href="http://tkcollier.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/history-of-buddhist-violence/" target="_blank">contention over exactly how peaceful Buddhism is</a>. I'm certainly not the expert here, but I will say that if <em>What the Buddha Taught</em> is at all accurate, then at the very least Buddhism places a much higher premium on peace than Christianity. Abrahamic religions tend to treat violence, be it in the Old Testament or the End Times (or Jihad), as a necessary means to an end. Buddhism treats it as wrong in all its forms. Even if Buddhism does have some violence in its history, there's still a pretty stark contrast between modern Buddhism's view of violence with modern Christianity's view of violence.<br />
<br />
<strong>Things Buddhism gets wrong and Christianity gets right</strong><br />
<br />
Buddhism rejects Doubt. It is explicitly called out as something that is going to prevent you from reaching enlightenment. This doesn't jive with me at all. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/" target="_blank">Bayesian belief doesn't allow for doubt-less belief</a>. We literally can NEVER be 100% sure of anything, and claiming that we can seems to me at best bad epistemology, and at worst an invitation to ignore evidence (I confess to being a bit confused by the duality presented in <em>What the Buddha Taught</em>- Doubt is listed as one of the "five hindrances to progress", but the author also cautions against "being attached to a certain view" as foolish and unwise). Christianity, on the other hand, seems to embrace doubt. Admittedly, many Christian families and denominations do not, but pretty much every famous Christian philosopher (Catholic or otherwise) has gone through severe doubts, and come away better for them. This one's a no-brainer for me. Without the possibility of doubt, you've given up any hope of fixing your beliefs if you're wrong.<br />
<br />
Buddhism advocates for detachment. It basically says that "Dukkha" (loosely translated "suffering", though the author stresses that this is an inadequate translation. Think along the lines of the Christian term "broken") arises because of our "thirst" for things of this world. It says that these desires are what stop us from reaching a true understanding of reality, which is what leads to enlightenment. This idea that "thirst" is the evil in itself is just plain weird to someone who comes from a Christian background. Christianity (in my estimation) teaches that this thirst is pointing us towards something much grander. It teaches that this thirst can be quenched, and indeed that a passion for good things (or passion against bad things) is one of the primary moral imperatives in this world. Love God and Love others- and Love is not detachment. I think the Christian view fits a lot better with my empirical experience- the happiest times in my life are when I've been in love, or passionate about something, or have a goal I'm striving towards- not when I've been detached.<br />
<br />
Buddhism (or rather, the Buddha) flatly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions" target="_blank">refused to answer some questions</a>. <em>What the Buddha Taught</em> basically says that our human-ness matters more that these unanswerable metaphysical questions. Now, I'm generally on board with this sentiment- I agree that our Human-ness matters a LOT more than metaphysical questions in terms of how we live our day-to-day lives. But I also think that these questions can help us differentiate which religion (if any) actually makes sense. That is to say, once you're a Buddhist (or a Christian or a Muslim), it's not such a big deal to not have an answer for these questions. But when deciding between these religions (or if you believe any of them at all), we ought to hold them all to the same standard. Since these metaphysical questions seem to me some of the best arguments against Atheism, it's important that religion offers a better answer than "it doesn't matter", or it hasn't differentiated itself from Atheism. One thing about Christianity- a lot of its answers aren't convincing, but it <a href="http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/locke.html" target="_blank"><em>always</em> has an answer</a>.<br />
<br />
But Buddhism goes farther than just refusing to answer a few question. This particular book says things like "Nirvana is beyond all terms of duality and relativity" <i>all the time</i>. He <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/" target="_blank">never nails down exactly what he's saying</a>. It seems like there's pattern here of hand-waiving; Buddhism can't answer what Nirvana is like, it can't explain where right and wrong come from, it can't explain where the Arahants go once their bodies die, and most importantly, it can't explain where any of it comes from, other than to say "it comes from itself" in some infinite cycle. It's certainly unfair to accuse Buddhism of this without acknowledging that both Christianity and Atheism do some hand-waiving themselves, but it seems like the hand-waiving of Buddhism is much more <i>foundational</i> than the other two.<br />
<br />
<br />
Buddhism also has no answer for <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/free-will-vs-determinism.html" target="_blank">determinism</a>. Here again it does some hand-waving, but it can't ultimately tell us why we as rational agents matter more than the sum of our parts anymore than atheism can. The Arahant is only the Arahant because he could not be anything else. And the non-enlightened is only non-enlightened because he has no choice. That's the crux of it- without a non-physical "soul", it seems to me we've lost the ability to say that we "choose" anything. We've lost will itself. Christianity has an answer for this. Granted, it's an answer that's often shrouded in the mystery of "God's ways are higher than our ways", but at least it's an answer.<br />
<br />
Finally, Buddhism is the only philosophical system I know of that really embraces the idea that you're really nothing more than the sum of your parts, and that "you" isn't actually the "you" you think it is- it's just whatever signals happen to be running around your brain at the moment. Certainly most forms of atheism lead to this conclusion- but usually it's followed by a wholesale rejection of the idea that this negates the concept of finding meaning. Buddhism, in contrast, seems to make it the goal to come to terms with your non-individuality, and sort of assimilate back into the universe (for lack of a better phrasing). The point is to get to a place where you recognize your non-individuality and you cease to even desire individuality. I certainly don't find that model very compelling- my moral intuitions point pretty clearly towards individuality and freedom being some of the highest "good" we can find.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Conclusion</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
It almost seems like Buddhism should be labeled "Romantic Atheism". It rejects basically everything "spiritual", but tries to hold on to meaning by talking in terms of morality, though I've yet to see any basis for calling something "right" or "wrong" in a Buddhist framework. In that sense, it finds itself vulnerable to the same moral relativism charges levied against Atheism. They both share the fundamental flaw that they can't tell us WHY humans matter. Buddhism talks a lot about the value of life, and how we ought to be compassionate and loving to all things- while simultaneously denying that things have a "self" to begin with. I can't rectify these competing values in a single world view- either in atheism or Buddhism. I'm actually thankful for the parallels I see between the two. I'm tempted to attribute my lack of understanding to a cultural bias of mine, that I am simply thinking like a westerner and don't understand. But it seems to me that lots of westerners make this claim too, and I don't agree with them either.<br />
<br />
But I'm still really unclear on who/what is actually getting enlightened if the mind/consciousness is just physical. Buddhism talks of disciplining the mind, but who or what is doing the "controlling" of the mind to discipline it in the first place? If we have no true sense of self, then it seems like there's no reason to care about finding enlightenment- and more importantly, nothing to be enlightened.<br />
<br />
I also found the author's criticism of theism a bit wonky. Pretty much any of the objections he made- "Though highly developed as theories, they are all the same extremely subtle mental projections, garbed in an intricate metaphysical and philosophical phraseology"- seem to apply word-for-word to Buddhism as well. <br />
<br />
Ultimately, I think I would give Buddhism a lot more credit if I had never been in love. Buddhism claims that detachment is the path to enlightenment. But my experience (and intuition) tells me that passion- whether for a person, an activity, or an ideal- is the only thing that gives life meaning.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-880468691463950402012-07-30T22:56:00.000-07:002012-07-30T22:56:54.449-07:00Falling Out of LoveBear with me here kids, this post is going to get a little personal- but I promise it's going to resolve to an actual philosophical point at the end.<br />
<br />
As readers may or may not know, <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-background-cliff-notes.html" target="_blank">I've been in love with a Christian girl for the last several years</a>- since back before I left Christianity. Recent events (last 6 months or so) have made it clear that I need to move on from that relationship. I'm now trying my best to fall out of Love with her.<br />
<br />
Now, I've got a couple of options here:<br />
<br />
1) Forget her. Facebook combined with my lack of self control makes this a difficult proposition, but not impossible. I could certainly keep busy enough to at least minimize the amount of time I spend dwelling on that past relationship<br />
<br />
2) Get angry at her. There's plenty of things from our past that I could get angry about (some that I genuinely am angry about, no encouragement required). Villifying another person is a pretty common mode of human interaction. If you're liberal, then those conservatives are souless sycophants. If you're conservative, those liberals are brainless ideologues. Especially in the case of interpersonal relationships, when things go wrong, the safest thing to do is usually to blame the other person. In my particular case, if I'm mad enough, that might assuage some of the pain associated with missing that relationship.<br />
<br />
3) Wait. This might or might not work, but either way it's not very <em>helpful</em> in my current position. More to the point, this seems like either a glorified version of option 1, or worse, a claim that the emotional pain will eventually form the equivalent of emotional scar tissue. That which used to hurt will no longer hurt because <em>there are no more nerves left to hurt</em>- not because I'm in any better of a position, and not because I've made any real moral or emotional progress.<br />
<br />
Here's the thing: I'm really suspicious of any solution that involves either <em>ignoring</em> or <em>fabricating </em>facts about reality. <br />
<br />
I want to <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/against-faith.html" target="_blank">understand and act on reality</a> in any given situation. This desire is the basis for my rejection of Christianity, and it would be pretty hypocritical for me to not apply this to my personal life as well. So to me, the problem with all the solutions I've suggested so far is that <em>I actually love her</em>. Forgetting that might be temporarily useful, but it has me dealing with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation" target="_blank">map that isn't a good representation of the territory</a> of my life. Ideologically, I'm flat out against self-deception, but even practically speaking, this seems like a really bad idea. All it takes for any of these solutions to fall apart is for me to have a single real conversation with her. In that conversation, I'm reminded of all the good things about her, all the reasons I fell in love, and I'm reminded that, while her actions may be objectionable, her motivations are not. She legitimately cares about me, and doesn't want to hurt me. And how angry can you really be with someone who's trying to do what's best for you inside the framework of what they think they're allowed to do? She may be wrong (I think she is), but she's not malicious. And it's hard for me to stay angry at someone who has my best intrest at heart.<br />
<br />
Now we're finally getting to the point. Two of them, actually. First, this thing called love is... <em>pure</em>. I can't think of any other word for it. There's a lot in the Bible that I don't agree with, but "love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud"- that stuff is spot on. I've talked before about how I find the <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/divinity-of-love.html" target="_blank">existence and quality of love a pretty good argument against materialism</a>, but the further I go in this process, the more convincing it gets. I have absolutely no explanation for why I don't hate this girl. It seems like I should. The only reason I don't is that I have this weird connection to her called "love" that I'm literally unable to overcome (I've tried). It's actually acting as a <em>stronger motivator</em> than my empirical experience of being continually hurt by that relationship- and that just gives me the epistemological willies. <br />
<br />
I'm not sure how to rectify this with atheism. The argument can certainly be made from evolutionary psychology that my experience of love is an evolutionarily selective behavior- that people who experience this kind of love are more likely to have a family and hang around for the development of the children, and therefore their children are more likely to succeed. But first, that seems pretty <em>ad hoc</em> to me- it's a decent after-the-fact explination, but <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/06/making-predictions.html" target="_blank">not a great prediction</a>. And second, I as a self-aware moral agent value <em>happiness</em> a lot more than I value <em>evolutionary fitness</em>. The experience of love- at least this part, the experience of leaving love behind- is pretty damaging to happiness, in both the short and the long term. It would seem that my optimal happiness strategy (at this point) would be to find a way to circumvent the love mechanism in my head- find a way to be happy without it, and get rid of my need to find love in the first place. If I can find happiness without love, that's <em>a lot less risky</em> of a way to go through life (using the simple heuristic that my own happiness is the ultimate goal of my existence). Once again, here I am <em>fighting against evolution</em>. And this is the core of my ongoing problem with atheistic morality- it always seems to end with me fighting against evolution.<br />
<br />
But there's another reason I'm not comfortable with this intentional abdication of the experience of love. I think I'm more convinced of love being a moral imperitive than I am of just about anything else. Call it irrational if you wish (I do), but my empirical, emotional, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism" target="_blank">consequential</a> experiences all tell me that love is <em>the most important thing </em>in this life. It seems likely, at this point, that my life would be better going forward if I found a workaround for love- but even if that's true, it still strikes me as <em>the wrong thing to do</em>.<br />
<br />
The second point of this post is more of a question: how do you kill something that is good? It seems like a lot of people at one point in life end up in a position where they're <em>actively trying to fall out of love</em>. It's sort of nonsensical to try in the first place. The very act of being in love should entail trying to preserve that love- and it's this cognitive dissonance that's rendering my attempts at "moving on" through conventional means pretty ineffective. I can't "move on" because <em>the desire to move on is incompatible with the experience of love</em>. If I were capable of moving on, I would no longer be in love, and would have nothing to move on from.<br />
<br />
But supposing we get to the point of wanting (or needing) to kill something that's good, how do you go about it without damaging your moral compass? I'm straying into virtue ethics here, but how do we destroy something valuable without simultaneously devaluing it? Is it even possible to force yourself out of love while also realizing what love actually is? This seems a lot like the argument that God is constrained to good because he alone understands the full consequences of good and bad. It seems like, the more clear understanding you have of what it means to love, the harder it's going to be for you to choose to stop loving.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-15817090801434947162012-07-16T01:45:00.001-07:002012-07-16T01:45:52.274-07:00The Dangers of Being Happy<i>*Note: I use the word "happy" here pretty loosely. I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion of happiness vs. joy vs. contentment, when I really mean all of them at once, so feel free to substitute your favorite word for "happy" throughout the post*</i><br />
<br />
I'm pretty sure I could be happy as an atheist.<br />
<br />
I know this because I've<em> been</em> happy as an atheist in the past. Sure, it would require some cognitive dissonance on my part- I would have to reject the nihilism that <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/nihilism.html" target="_blank">seems to me incumbent on the atheistic worldview</a>- but I certainly wouldn't be the first to do so. More to the point, it's starting to look like <em>any</em> cogent world view is <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/after-skepticism.html" target="_blank">going to require some cognitive dissonance on my part</a>.<br />
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It often crosses my mind, as I'm driving to work, or sitting at home browsing reddit, that if I let myself, I could be happy <em>right now</em>. I could pretty easily choose to focus on the present moment and the things I'm pretty sure have meaning, even if I don't have a metaphysical basis for <em>why</em> I think they have meaning. I could still value love, empathy, conciousness, and the human experience, completely devoid of a moral framework to back it all up. Believe me; I've done it before.<br />
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But I'm really, really nervous about <em>choosing</em> to be happy, for two reasons. First, it seems like once you allow yourself to be happy, you've eliminated the motivation to keep looking. Unless you're really, really sure that your philosophical system is the right one- or that it doesn't matter one way or another- then being content with your philosophy is the most dangerous thing you can do. <br />
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Second, I'm pretty sure I'd rather be <em>right</em> than <em>happy</em>. This is not an ideological stance, but rather a practical one. It seems really likely that the consequences of being wrong are a lot worse than the consequences of being unhappy. This is definitely true if any religion is correct, but even if atheism is true- to bend our moral intuitions to some external authority of religion is a <em>really bad idea</em> if we pick the wrong religion. People have written <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/1600245579" target="_blank">entire books</a> based on the strife that religion has caused- and continues to cause- in human society. If there is no God, then the best thing we as a species can do it get over it and make the best of reality.<br />
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My belief system at the moment is extremely <em>uncomfortable</em>. But if being uncomfortable is the natural outcome of my belief system, it seems better that I remain uncomfortable rather than paper over any holes in my metaphysics like a college senior moving out of a dorm. This leads to the question I really don't want to ask- is it <em>ever</em> ok to be happy? It seems like the answer here has to be "no", unless I'm <em>really</em> sure I've found the truth.<br />
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To be fair, it's not like there's no middle ground between being happy and thinking for yourself. But I've seen in myself that the main motivation for me to care- the reason why I spend so much time and energy on metaphysics, philosophy and religion- is my philosophical discomfort. If being happy entails ignoring that discomfort, then I'm going to go do more worthwhile things (read: play more video games). I'm just not that <em>interested</em> in philosophy. I only care about it because I think it <em>matters</em>. And once (if) I no longer have any need for it, I expect I will jettison that part of my life in favor of whatever else catches my fancy.<br />
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I wonder how other people deal with this problem. It seems like most of the people roaming the philosophy blogosphere are genuinely interested in philosophy, so it's not such a problem for them. But there's plenty of people- most people- who go about their everyday lives without so much as a thought towards metaphysics. I'm suspicious of the heuristic they're using to reach the conclusion that they've done enough metaphysical legwork to find the local maximum of philisophical utility; how did they decide when they were done <em>thinking</em> about their ethics? We all <em>act</em> on our ethics, but which ethical standards we use is highly dependant on which metaphysical system we adopt. If Christianity is wrong, then Christians are <em>doing life wrong</em>. If Atheism is wrong, then Atheists are <em>doing life wrong</em>. And I'm not at all sure how to bootstrap myself out of a sort of inherent uncertainty about my metaphysical system with the level of confidence I would need to declare myself unequivocally <i>right</i> about things.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-63025645048988016432012-07-08T23:55:00.001-07:002012-07-08T23:55:07.452-07:00Stargate EpistemologyI love <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_SG-1" target="_blank">Stargate SG-1</a>. It's probably my second favorite TV show of all time (behind the incredibly under-appreciated comedy series <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted" target="_blank">Better Off Ted</a>). I like it so much, in fact, that I'm watching the whole series (all 10 seasons!) on netflix right now. Sometimes I feel guilty about watching netflix instead of reading, but then I remember that the only way my apartment ever gets cleaned is when I have the tv on in the background, and I don't feel so bad.<br />
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One of the best things about Stargate is that it delves into some really complex topics, from ethics to epistemology to the very definition of a God (including several incarnations of how to deal with the <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/morality-in-multiple-dimensions.html" target="_blank">Sati problem</a>) in enough detail that it actually makes you <em>think</em> about the right thing for the characters to do. The show also deals with pretty much every major sci-fi trope, including time travel, advanced alien races, faster than light travel, artificial life forms, and parallel universes. Not to say that the show isn't sometimes a bit heavy-handed, but it is without a doubt <em>expansive.</em><br />
<br />As I'm watching through the whole series, I find it to be a good analogy to my experience of <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-view-of-bible-part-1.html" target="_blank">reading through the Old Testament in big chunks</a>. Before doing so, I had only digested the Old Testament in little pieces, and the whole thing read quite differently. Likewise, watching whole seasons of Stargate over a few days is quite different than watching them one episode at a time. The big thing I'm noticing is that there are certain themes that are popping up relentlessly, in almost every single episode. There's two specific themes I want to mention here.<br />
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First, the epistemology of the main characters. It seems like every other episode, someone is getting their memory erased. Off the top of my head, I can think of three instances where characters got taken over by aliens, two where a character was taken over by a machine, four where characters had their memory wiped or replaced, two where all the <em>other</em> characters had been replaced with aliens, one where the main characters were themselves machines (but didn't realize it), and two where a character was brainwashed. They deal with the topic of epistemology <em>a lot</em>.<br />
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What I've noticed is that their answer is always the same- and it's the answer the viewer intuitively agrees with (or at least, the answer I intuitively agree with). The "right" action for the characters to take- the action the viewer, who is generally omniscient after the first 15 minutes or so, is rooting for the character to take- is to <em>be suspicious</em>. In the Stargate world, someone is <em>always</em> trying to trick the good guys, but they never actually <em>know</em> someone is trying to trick them. Now, it's pretty clear that the only way to get by in that kind of world is to be suspicious of pretty much everything. But I'm going to argue that that's the only way to get by in any world where there's even the <em>possibility</em> that someone is trying to trick you.<br />
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All these different episodes give us some concrete (if farfetched) examples of how and why it's important to be skeptical. They attempt to demonstrate that <em>bad beliefs have bad consequences</em>. If we take that as a given (and I think most people would), then we're left with the question of how often we're proffered a set of bad beliefs. The answer in our modern society, no matter what you believe, seems to be <em>all the time</em>. Since so many of us hold mutually exclusive beliefs, we ought to be <em>really suspicious</em> of all of them- including our own. I've <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/applied-skepticism.html" target="_blank">gone on the record about skepticism</a> in the past, but I left out the fact that (almost) everyone is a skeptic- of other people's beliefs. You have to be, or you just end up at some useless pluralist belief. The better question is how we treat our <em>own</em> beliefs. I seem to agree with the writers of Stargate- the only reasonable way to treat our own beliefs is with a hefty dose of skepticism.<br />
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The second really interesting topic is the question of what it even means to be a God. There are several alien races running around the Stargate universe, but there's three main ones that impersonate gods at various points: the evil Goa'uld, the benevolent Asgard, and the frighteningly god-like Ori.<br />
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I'm always a little disappointed by the writer's treatment of the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld are a race of parasitic snake-like creatures that crawl into people's heads and take over. They imbue their hosts with great strength, intelligence, and healing powers, and they have the proverbial sufficiently advanced technology that appears like magic. They go around enslaving human worlds, pretending to be gods from ancient earth cultures (Ra, Apophis, Anubis, Nerti, etc). Problem is, they make really <em>unconvincing</em> gods. They war amongst themselves. They have children which eventually usurp them. They are considered immortal, but they seem to kill each other fairly frequently. It all sounds a great deal like the gods of ancient Egypt (not surprising, since that's what most of it is based off of). It seems to betray my modern western monotheistic bias that I find such depictions of gods unconvincing. So far as I've been taught, people in the ancient world <em>actually believed</em> these things. The fact that I can so easily dismiss them- not just as true, but even as reasonable plot devices in a story- makes me question whether the idea of any God at all does not sound plausible to me simply because of the culture I was raised in. I wonder if I had been raised in a purely secular culture if I would view the Christian monotheistic God- who sent his Son in human form to be sacrificed at the hands of humans in a small corner of the desert a few thousand years before society had advanced to the point of being able to accurately verify and record such events- with the same level of smug indifference as I currently view the false gods of the Goa'uld. I roll my eyes at the gullibility of the humans taken in by the Goa'uld, but humans really and truly did believe such things at one point- no doubt with simillar resolve as religious people today believe.<br />
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The Asgard present another interesting case study. They are a benevolent race that protects human societies from the Goa'uld, but they still pose as gods. They consider these societies to not yet be "ready" (read: advanced enough) to abandon their religions. Frankly, it's a pretty condescending view of religion (it seems pretty clear the Stargate writers are atheists), but it shows the viewer something of an unattended side effect. There are a few episodes where SG-1 tries to convince some native peoples to take some drastic action to save themselves instead of trusting in the power of Thor (the Asgard take on the form of old Norse gods), and it's shocking how very little difference there is between an Asgard world and a Goa'uld world. In almost all cases, the people are sort of blindly flailing at some <em>idea</em> of God, rather than interacting with the gods as they are. Typically, the people have no direct interaction with the diety of choice, but they construct whole theologies and moral systems around them. It's really interesting to see the parallels between blindly following a "good" false god and blindly following a "bad" false god. At least in the Stargate universe, it matters less than you'd think.<br />
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It's the last race that I find the most interesting. The Ori are a group of "Ascended" beings from another galaxy that ultimately seek dominion over our own galaxy. They have a sort of treaty with the "Ancients", the group of Ascended beings that live in our galaxy, but that doesn't stop them from sending what amount to missionaries- albeit extremely powerful and aggressive missionaries- into our galaxy. These Ori are <em>really</em> close to our definition of gods- they have powers well beyond our comprehension, and well beyond our ability to interfere with. Really, there are only two things that disqualify them being gods- first, they're not good guys. They have most of the powers of gods, but they use that power for inherently selfish purposes (they draw power from worshipers, so they go about "converting" every civilization they find). We have this idea that any formulation of God is necessarily benevolent, but <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/problem-of-independent-morality.html" target="_blank">I'm not so sure I buy that notion</a>- and Stargate makes an attempt to call us out on our seemingly artificial limitation on the character of a god or god-like being. <br />
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The second thing disqualifying the Ori from godhood is that <em>we know they're not gods</em>. We know that they are ultimately just beings like us who ascended to a higher plain of existence. This begs the question, what exactly do we mean by God in the first place, if not a being that exists on a higher plain of existence than us? If it's not intuitively clear to me that we can assume the character of any God would be benevolent, it's even less clear that what it even means when we say "God". If what we mean is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, then we have a good definition, but at the expense of leaving any room for our own lack of understanding. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not intuitively clear to me that we can define God in the first place, much less why such a being would necessarily be the only possible kind of super-powerful-godlike-being. The only way I can imagine arriving at a particular conception of God would be if God revealed himself to be a particular way and of a particular character (as many religions claim he has). But even if we take this route, we've negated the effectiveness of a great deal of apologetics arguments. The nature and character of God does not seem to me to be evident from the world we live in, so the only possible convincing evidence for God would be direct revelation- a claim that unfortunately many different religions make.<br />
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But my favorite part of Stargate is watching as two characters- Teal'c and Bra'tac- try to convince their fellow Jaffa that the gods they serve are false. It's not at all close to a one-to-one mapping onto the way Christians and Atheists interact, but it's usually an epistemologically interesting discussion. Plus, it usually ends with Teal'c and Bra'tac beating the pants off some bad guys.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-81044795034943078762012-06-27T14:50:00.000-07:002012-06-28T12:54:36.126-07:00Interpretive DissonanceI've noticed recently how <em>sure</em> everyone seems to be that their worldview- and all necessary conclusions flowing from that worldview- are correct. And I've noticed that after a worldview makes a truth claim about reality, adherents of that worldview act as if this claim is unavoidable, inevitable, and unquestionable. They act- and worse, argue- as if this claim <em>stands on its own</em>, and is not derived from or dependant on their particular worldview.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">I'm calling this phenomenon Interpretive Dissonance, because it's advocating that we take as an axiom a truth claim that was arrived at <em>only after the facts had been looked at. </em>It's a <i>reversal</i> of the proper order of reasoning- going from "I believe A, which implies B" to "B is axiomatically true, therefore A must be true because it implies B".</span><br />
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For example, I recently had a conversation with one of my fundamentalist evangelical friends where I asked her if she had ever considered Catholicism. She told me she could never be a Catholic because "Catholics don't see the relationship with Jesus as personal. They think you need to go through a priest and through Mary to get to God." Now, leaving aside the question of whether or not this is accurate to Catholic theology, what was really interesting to me was this <i>presumption</i> that the only conceivable God of the universe would be her specific conception of a personal, relational God with Jesus as the go-between. It struck me was that the question in her mind wasn't "is Catholicism true?", but rather "does Catholicism conform to my current beliefs?" She had this idea that God must be personal, and (her understanding of) Catholicism didn't fit that arc- so she rejected Catholicism out of hand, before even considering that <em>it might actually be true</em>.<br />
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Not too long ago, I got into a debate <span style="background-color: white;">about gay marriage </span><span style="background-color: white;">with an old Bible teacher of mine. I am happy to listen to arguments against gay marriage (or homosexuality in general), and there are some decent ones (mostly centered around the natural law and preserving same-sex friendship). His position, however, was that the old testament explicitly set up the idea of "traditional" marriage Christianity advocates for today. I pointed out that, in the Old Testament, Eve is created as an afterthought to Adam, only once no other suitable partner could be found, and further that pretty much the entirety of the Old Testament promotes polygamy (and, in many cases, keeping a harem of concubines) as the proper ordering of sexual relationships. But he had reached this conclusion- that heterosexual monogamous marriages are the proper expression of human sexuality- and flatly <i>could not conceive</i> of a reality where this was not true. He had interpreted the New Testament and modern Protestant teaching (both of which do give a legitimate basis for "traditional" marriage) and was convinced that the Old Testament must not only be compatible with, but actually <em>advocate</em> for this same teaching. He wasn't looking at evidence and arriving at a conclusion, he was <em>starting</em> from the conclusion and working his way back to how to interpret the evidence.</span><br />
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But I think the most obvious incarnation of Interpretive Dissonance is in the Christian idea of needing a savior. I've been told repeatedly that I need to "recognize my need for a savior", and that my rejection of Christianity is really just a prideful rejection of my need to be saved. But here's the thing- the conclusion of our need for a savior comes only<em> after</em> our conclusion on the character and nature of God. I freely admit that if the Christian worldview is true, I absolutely need a savior- I am a sinner more than most. But it's ludicrous to say that I need a savior <em>a priori</em> to deciding what I believe about God. It's crazy to say that our knowledge of reality is so precisely calibrated that the <em>only conception of God that could possibly exist</em> would be one that sent his son as a savior for mankind. I have no problem with people who find that theology the most compelling, but I have a huge problem with people who <em>assume I secretly agree with them</em>.<br />
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I think there's a really easy proof against this a-priori-savior concept. Consider the people who lived before Christ. These people lived in the same world as us, <em>but there was no savior yet</em>. The necessity of a physical, relational, personal savior can't be an ontological imperitive, unless you're claiming a rational human being in this period would arrive at the conclusion <em>without divine revelation</em> that a savior <em>must be coming in the future</em>. Other religions talk about needing to be saved/forgiven/recieve grace from God (notably Islam, which basically says it's God's volitional forgiveness that gets believers into heaven, since no human acts are good enough), and there's nothing about reality that <em>inherently</em> requires a physical human incarnation of God to act as our eternal savior. That may be the most compelling narrative- and it may in fact be true- but a claim that it is <em>necessary</em> is either a claim of divine revelation of its necessity, or a claim of a complete and unflawed understanding of the character, nature, and choices of God.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">I've found Interpretive Dissonance to be</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><i>really</i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">common among evangelicals, but t</span>his is by no means a flaw unique to protestants, or even unique to the religious. For example, I've been really disappointed with the response to Leah's conversion. Scant few of the comments I've read have been reasonable objections to her epistemology or challenges to specific Catholic beliefs. Mostly, it's been condescending Catholics playing the "a real search for truth always leads to Catholicism" card, and frighteningly dogmatic atheists railing against the stupidity of religion. Both groups (definitely not everyone involved, but a significant portion) are taking this position that the other side is absolutely <i>nuts</i>. They don't seem interested in looking at the evidence and seeing where it leads, but rather have <i>decided</i> where the evidence should lead, and are going to interpret the evidence in such a way, <i>no matter what the evidence is</i>.<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">And that's the real problem with Interpretive Dissonance. It stops asking the question "is this true?" and starts trying to conform evidence to the hypothesis. It's every bad scientific and statistical methodology rolled into one. Once we believe something to be true, we shouldn't be locked into it to the point where everything we see <i>must </i>support that conclusion. All that is is a recipe for believing </span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">in perpetuity </span><span style="background-color: white;">the first thing that happens to clear our </span><span style="background-color: white;">Bayesian</span><span style="background-color: white;"> threshold. It's <i>OK</i> to have </span><span style="background-color: white;">conflicting</span><span style="background-color: white;"> evidence. In fact, any position that reasonable people disagree on <i>should</i> have conflicting evidence. If you legitimately don't see the conflicting evidence in the cases where reasonable people disagree (even within your own worldview), then you probably need to jettison your interpretive practice, </span><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/" target="_blank">because you're doing it wrong</a><span style="background-color: white;">.</span><br />
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I do want to be clear that I'm not advocating that everyone "play nice and get along". These are important questions, and we should be trying to convince each other of what we think the truth is. But we need to do it by rationally weighing the evidence the other side presents and actually updating our priors when we find good evidence in either direction<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Finally, in the interest of using actual scientific terminology, I should point out that the idea I'm trying to get at with Interpretive Dissonance is really some combination of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring" target="_blank">anchoring bias</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect" target="_blank">the backfire effect</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias" target="_blank">confirmation bias</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect" target="_blank">the observer-expectancy effect</a>, and (most directly) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias" target="_blank">belief bias</a>.</span>Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-88004866867085566422012-06-19T00:56:00.000-07:002012-06-19T01:40:11.662-07:00Holy Unexpected Development Batman!So, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html" target="_blank">Leah's a Catholic</a><br />
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I have to be honest- I'm not shocked by this. Surprised, absolutely- I did not wake up this morning thinking the next Unequally Yoked post I read would be in Patheos' Catholic portal. But Leah has held what I consider <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/human-independent-morality.html" target="_blank">internally inconsistent</a> beliefs for quite some time (<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/should-atheism-be-a-comfortable-belief.html" target="_blank">and she knew it</a>). I've been quite vocal about the fact that I can't rectify virtue ethics (or really any other ethical system) and the materialism I think necessarily follows from Atheism, so I'm not surprised that someone who I agree with a lot couldn't rectify them either. She's just a lot more sure of the former than I am.<br />
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That said, this is a staunch departure from <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/tag/firewall-of-faith" target="_blank">some of her comments as recently as 8 months ago</a>. I'm really interested to see how she goes about dealing with all of the reasons she's given in the past for why Catholicism <i>isn't</i> compelling to her. <br />
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In point of fact, she seems concerned with much different features of religion than I am- she is concerned mostly with morality and <i>telos</i>, whereas I spend a lot more time looking at the less attractive parts of various religions (like the Old Testament, or the Buddhist doctrine of detachment, etc.) under the assumption that if you reject one pillar of a given religion, you must reject the entire religion. I don't know that one method is categorically better than the other, but I am really interested to see how she defends her new position.<br />
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Ultimately, I'm really excited for Leah. I legitimately <i>hope</i> she's found truth- but even if she hasn't, this will be a tremendous learning experience for her (My understanding is that she's a cradle Atheist, but I could be wrong there). I obviously don't <i>think</i> she's right- at least not at the moment- but I've read enough of her blog to be convinced that she is legitimately looking for truth. And if her search for truth has lead her down a path that I don't quite agree with, then at the very least it should be taken as a clue to me to take the position seriously.<br />
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I know from personal experience how hard a conversion can be. You need a certain level of intellectual honesty to admit that <i>you've been wrong your whole life</i>. For someone as well known and influential as her, I'm sure it was even more difficult than I realize in light of the reaction she knew her hundreds of Atheist readers would have. That takes a great deal of moral fortitude.<br />
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I'll certainly be challenging her on her new beliefs in the coming months, but for today, I'll just say good for her. I don't agree with her conclusion, but I do agree with the way she went about getting there- and I'm definitely rooting for her.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-60132592192207467642012-06-14T17:41:00.001-07:002012-06-15T12:46:29.473-07:00Ideological Turing Test Complete! ... you failed.So, it turns out I don't make a very convincing Atheist <em>or</em> a very convnicing Christian.<br />
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Unequally Yoked recently concluded it's (annual?) <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/ideological-turing-test.html" target="_blank">Ideological Turing Contest</a>. You can find the preliminary <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/atheist-round-winners-turing-2012.html" target="_blank">Athiest results</a> and <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/christian-round-winners-turing-2012.html" target="_blank">Christian results</a> posted already, with a promise of more in depth statistcal analysis on the way (I can't be the only one who gets excited at the words "statistical analysis", can I?). And if there is such a thing as a winner and loser (it is a contest, after all), <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/05/turing-2012-atheist-answer-12.html" target="_blank">I most certainly lost</a> (<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/turing-2012-christian-answer-1.html" target="_blank">twice</a>). I was the only entrant who scored below 50% both in my real answer and my fake answer (no, that's not pride you hear in my voice).<br />
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First, a brief description of my strategy: for my Athiest entry, I tried to describe reality as I see it if Atheism is true. I can't really be upset that most people found it not very compelling- <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/free-will-vs-determinism.html" target="_blank">I don't find it very compelling myself</a>. But I do find it the most internally consistent.<br />
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What <em>did</em> surprise me- though I suppose it shouldn't- is how many people thought I was a Catholic. Certainly I've done a fair bit of religious reading over the last several months, so some of the Catholic verbiage has probably entered my vocabulary through Osmosis (references to "Authority" and Chesterton's "truth-telling thing" ostensibly gave me away as a Catholic sympathizer). But I think my real problem is that I didn't present Atheism as a compelling framework that anybody would ever <em>want</em> to believe in- and that's because I legitimately don't think it is.<br />
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For my Christian entry, I made the monumental mistake of trying to immitate a fundamentalist evangelical. I had some good reasons for doing this- I grew up in fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, the vast majority of my friends are fundamentalist evangelicals, and I frankly didn't think I could hack it as a Catholic immatator. I don't know any of the cool Latin phrases, and I was afraid I'd be given away when I launched into a paragraph-long explanation of why we can't rely on scripture in a vacuum, not realizing that a real Catholic would reference <em>sola scriptura</em> in any such discussion (hey look, I do know one!)<br />
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That said, I really should have realized a couple of flaws in my diabolical plan. <br />
<br />
First, I no longer think like a fundamentalist. That different type of thinking is what led me to reject it in the first place, and it's only gotten worse in the last three years as I've stopped going to church and Bible study regularly. For every question, I tried to ask myself "what would my friend so-and-so say to this?", but it turns out I failed pretty miserably at that. While I don't think my answers were necessarily too far off from what my fundamentalist friends <em>believe</em>, they're <em>waaaaaaay</em> off from what my fundamentalist friends would have <em>answered </em>(this came out pretty clearly in the comments section of my Christian post.) I care about really different issues than most fundamentalists, and I got caught red handed.<br />
<br />
Second, there's not a lot of fundamentalists on Unequally Yoked. I tend to think that a legitimate fundamentalist answer would not have done particularly well either (though this is <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/excuses.html" target="_blank">pure speculation on my part</a>)<br />
<br />
Third, I apparently no longer know how to talk like a fundamentalist either. Even in trying to answer in the voice of my fundamentalist friends, some Catholic ideas wormed their way in (I blame Jennifer). In particular, the idea of the Church as a truth-telling thing once again reared its ugly head (though interestingly, Chesterton has been recommended to me by several pastors/friends/relatives who are decidedly not Catholic- and for the record, I have read Orthodoxy, but nothing else from Chesterton. The Everlasting Man currently sits gathering dust on my shelf, 15th or so in line)<br />
<br />
In retrospect, I wish I had either tried my hand as a Catholic (though I suspect I woul have done just as poorly), or else given my best approximation of reality if God is in fact real. At least that would have made for a more interesting read. Instead, I tried to tow a party line, and didn't do it particularly well.<br />
<br />
Finally, I proffer two quotes from the comments I thought were worth mentioning:<br />
<br />
"Plus, like math_geek says, an even moderately educated Christian would have talked of homosexual behaviour rather than homosexuality per se"<br />
<br />
This one actually really surprised me. I lived my whole life in fundamentalist Christianity, and this was (obviously) not drilled into me nearly so well as readers thought it would have been. Not sure if this is a reflection of my upbringing, or of the unequally yoked community, or of how far I've lost touch with my Christian roots. Regardless, an interesting introspective for me.<br />
<br />
"Totally atheist. Probably just about died writing the words “I wouldn’t defer to
any holy book that advocated violence or oppression.""<br />
<br />
This one made me laugh. He's correct in saying I don't agree with this stance- but in all my conversations with my fundamentalist friends, the majority of them definitely believe this.<br />
<br />
I really like <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/evetushnet/2012/06/ideological-turing-test-results-sin-makes-me-stupid.html" target="_blank">Eve Tushnet's</a> conclusion on this- humility humility humility! Even though I like to think I have a pretty good idea of all the major players at the table, it's pretty clear- both from the degree of difficulty this assignment presented me and from how objectively poorly I did at convincing people I was playing for their side- that I don't understand nearly so much as I think.<br />
<br />
Big thanks to Leah for running the turing test, and for letting a schmuck like me have a go. I wish I could say I would do better next time- maybe she could add an agnostic category. I think I'd nail that one.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-32531185186803483952012-06-12T22:20:00.004-07:002012-06-14T11:13:02.935-07:00Making PredictionsI'm a huge fan of <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/" target="_blank">making testable predictions</a>. There are several reasons why it's important that beliefs we have (particularly beliefs that are important enough for us to act on) make predictions.<br />
<br />
First, if a prediction comes true, it means that in this specific case, the world behaves as if our model is correct. That's not the same as saying that our model actually <em>is </em>correct, but as we accumulate more and more instances of reality behaving as if our model is true, we become more and more confident that our model is at least a good approximation of reality.<br />
<br />
Second, beliefs that make predictions are <em>allowing themselves to be falsified</em>. This is either a sign of great confidence, or a desire to find truth, even at the expense of preference. I don't trust anything that doesn't allow itself to be falsified. If there is no set of evidence that could contradict a given position, then that position cannot be rationally held (I speak here of "evidence" in the broadest sense. For the purposes of metaphysics, personal experience can count as evidence too)<br />
<br />
Third, any model fuzzy enough to explain any conceivable evidence isn't actually making any claims about reality. And any model that doesn't make claims about reality just isn't very useful. The geo-centric model is a good example here. As planetary orbits were observed, the data flat out didn't fit with a geo-centric model. So, people made up increasingly complex orbits, where <a href="http://www.enchantedlearning.com/egifs/Epicycle.GIF" target="_blank">planets were looping around themselves</a>, to explain the observed data. The theory was no longer predicting results and then observing outcome, rather it was changing its underlying assumptions based on the data it observed. Not terribly useful for anyone who wanted the model to generate any information that <em>wasn't already known </em>about reality.<br />
<br />
Ex post facto predictions are sort of a can of worms- since we all know what reality is <em>actually</em> like, we all have a tendency to try to explain how and why our belief system would have predicted reality to be this way. Often times we feel that if we admit that our model would make predictions that we don't see in reality, that's tantamount to admitting that our model isn't true (I don't think this is the case at all, since its possible, even likely, that we just don't understand all the ramifications of our model.) Hindsight predictions suffer from a lot of rationalization, so they don't make great scientific tools. However, I still think it's an interesting excercise to talk about what we think a given model of reality would predict, <em>a priori</em> to actually experiencing that reality.<br />
<br />
That are really three questions worth answering in the context of this blog: <br />
1. What would we expect a hypothetical world without God to look like? <br />
2. What would we expect a hypothetical world with God to look like?<br />
3. What does the world actually look like?<br />
<br />
<b>1. What would we expect a hypothetical world without God to look like? </b><br />
<br />
If God is not real, I would not expect life to exist. Much, much more likely to me would be a universe of inanimate matter (or no universe at all). However, given that life does exist (particularly the complex life we observe to exist), we would expect there to be a reasonable way life could have arisen, propogated, and grown in complexity. We find exactly that in evolution- and we find good evidence that it has actually happened. I would expect that the universe, and the earth, would have existed for billions of years to allow time for evolution to progress far enough to give us the current level of complexity. We find exactly that as well. I would also expect life to have arisen on other planets in the universe. Surely it is too much to think that there is exactly one habitable planet in the universe, or that of all the habitable planets, one and only one actually generated life. Unfortunately, we are a long way away from exploring the billions of planets in the universe (and unless we flip physics on its head and discover a way to travel faster than light, we will never get there). However, if we do someday find life on other planets, this seems like a death knell for religion (although some <a href="http://www.answering-christianity.com/aliens_in_quran.htm" target="_blank">claim that Islam predicts extraterrestrial life forms</a>)<br />
<br />
If God is not real, I would not expect conciousness to exist. Even if we admit that life could arise without divine intervention, it's a staggeringly long way to go from a biological machine to a self aware moral agent. The very fact that we question why we're here, that we even have the faculties to look for purpose, is something I would never have predicted from a Atheistic universe.<br />
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If God is not real, I would not expect morality to matter in the slightest. We may speak of evolutionary psychology and us being social animals- and these do a decent job of explaining things after the fact- but there's absolutely no way I would have predicted that.<br />
<br />
If God is not real, I would not expect guilt to exist. As social animals, it makes sense that we would need something to curtail our selfish desires in favor of what benefits society. But guilt seems to be a horrible mechanism to accomplish this. It's an after-the-fact disappointment in our own behavior, but it's not very good at stopping us from doing the bad behavior in the first place (at least it's not for me. Perhaps others have had a different experience).<br />
<br />
If God is not real, I would expect cheaters, liars, and selfish people to succeed disproportionally to the rest of society. To have a functioning (read: evolutionarily stable) society, you need to have some critical mass of people willing to play by the rules. If you don't, then the social fabric will break down, and the resulting free-for-all is detrimental to the survival of all individuals within that group. But, presuming you have enough of those people, there's a clear survival advantage for those willing to break the rules if the payout is good enough. This seems to be what we observe in reality- there are lots of corrupt rich people (But perhaps we just hear about the corrupt ones? Perhaps rich people actually are more honest, as a percentage, than non-rich people?).<br />
<br />
If God is not real, I would expect worldly success to yield greater happiness. Evolutionarily speaking, people should be hardwired to not be happy in low social standing, and to be happy (though vigilant) in high social standing. This does not seem to be the case- the affluent seem to manufacture artificial problems for themselves, while the destitute often maintain a happy lifestyle. The things we want are not the things that make us happy. This market inefficiency should not exist in a world of evolution.<br />
<br />
<b>2. What would we expect a hypothetical world with God to look like?</b><br />
<br />
There are actually two cases here- one is that God is real and wants us to know the specifics about him. The other is that God is real and doesn't really care if we know anything about him. Since pretty much all religions deal with the first case, that's the position I'll be assuming.<br />
<br />
If God is real, I would expect it to be obvious. It isn't. Not only is his very existence not obvious, but even if we were prepared to take God's existence as a brute fact, it's not clear which if any of the hundreds of versions of God humanity has come up with is correct. The fact that there is no dominant religion, some 1500 years after most of the major religions have been formulated, is totally unexpected.<br />
<br />
If God is real, I would expect people to share a common base of morality. C.S. Lewis makes a big deal out of the argument from natural law, but the more I've thought about it and the more I've read about it, it seems that we humans have wildly divergent beliefs about what is right and what it wrong. Individual freedom, the value of human life, gender equality, anti-slavery sentiment, gay rights- all of these are relatively modern ideals. We don't share a common morality with our forefathers, we don't share a common morality with our neighbors in the Middle East, and we don't even share a common morality with the various other religious groups in our own modern industrialized countries. If there is an objective moral standard, our view of it seems totally inadequate to be making any even remotely difficult moral judgements.<br />
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If God is real, I would expect love to exist. Particularly if God is real and deemed humanity worth creating, love- the interaction of two totally foreign beings somehow yielding an intimate relationship- seems like the engine that drives it all. This is exactly what I find in reality (Perhaps it's too strong to say that a God-based reality would <i>predict </i>love, since love is a little bit absurd. Let's say instead that it <i>fits the framework</i> amazingly well, admittedly after the fact)<br />
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If God is real, I would expect living things to have a consciousness. You can't love if you aren't aware.<br />
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If God is real, I would expect only beings with a moral consciousness to exist. I would not expect ants, mice, bats, birds, lions, or even apes to exist. Why create a complicated biological machine that does not fulfill the purpose of love? But we do find such machines, and we don't hold them accountable as moral agents<br />
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If God is real, I would not expect evolution. Why go to all the trouble of creating just the first life, and letting it morph and mutate over the next 3 billion years- especially if you're capable of snapping your fingers and making it happen? But we find excellent evidence for evolution.<br />
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If God is real, I would expect him to be living and active. This is not living and active in the way some Christians mean- God working all things behind the scenes for the good of those who love him- but rather obvious, apparent, and actively intervening in every day life. I would expect God to engage humanity in a relationship, and a relationship is necessarily bi-directional. Having a bunch of puny humans sing some songs isn't a relationship. If God wanted to be friends, if he wanted to be a ruler, if he wanted to be a confidant, he could be any of these things- but my experience in reality is that he acts as none of them. Or rather, any one human conception of God works just as well for these purposes as any other human conception, and it's impossible to distinguish, in practice, the role of Allah in the Muslims life from the role of Yahweh in the Christians life. They believe different things about their Gods, but they believe it on essentially the same kinds of evidence. If one were real and the other false, I would expect one to be a demonstrably <i>better</i> relationship- and therefore one religion absolutely wiping the floor with the other. And that's not what we see in reality.<br />
<br />
If God is real, I would expect holding to moral principles to matter. I would expect kind, generous people to be successful, and crude, selfish people to fail. This does not always (or even often) seem to be the case.<br />
<br />
<b>3. What does the world actually look like?</b><br />
<br />
I am surprised, in writing this post, that this is the question I'm getting stuck on. I honestly see two different worlds, depending on which lens I look through. I see one world where morality and justice prevail; a sort of karmic rightness, at least on a large scale. I see another where people who lie and cheat and steal get ahead. I see a world where love matters, where people overcome the baseness of their humanity to do amazing (and often self-sacrificing) things. I see another where idealistic dependance on love strangles a right view of reality; we are born alone and we die alone, and everything else will eventually be stripped away.<br />
<br />
I don't think I've made any real progress here- I still see the existence and complexity of humanity, purpose, love, etc. as the primary problem for Atheism, and I still see the existence of other religions with equally staunch adherents as the primary problem for any organized religion. But I am curious if anyone disagrees with me about what predictions these world views would actually make a priori.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-45386740952045364502012-05-30T22:25:00.002-07:002012-06-14T11:14:42.574-07:00The Problem of Independent Morality<i>*Note: I'm not very happy with the way this post turned out. I reserve the right to make edits later, particularly if it comes out in the comments that I was unclear on something*</i><br />
<br />
Many Christians (and indeed, I myself) are fond of pointing out that Atheists seem to lack any solid metaphysical grounding for the moral intuitions by which they live their lives. Many Christians also take it as a given that Christianity solves this problem. But I'm not so sure.<br />
<br />
The typical Christian claim goes something like this: there is an omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-benevolent God. This God is the arbiter of morality- he is both its source and it's ultimate judge. That which we call "good" could more accurately be termed "of the character of God", and that which we call "bad" is actually that which is "separate from God".<br />
<br />
But it seems to be the case that morality in this framework is just as arbitrary as in the Atheist's. It arises purely based on the character of God. That is to say, if God's character had been different, morality itself would have been different. But in reality, there seems to me a clear difference between what we call morally good and morally bad behaviors. Morally good things are things that fundamentally <em>benefit</em> people- make them more comfortable, happier, more secure, more free. Things that we call morally bad are things that fundamentally <em>hurt</em> people- cause them discomfort, pain, anguish, uncertainty, and fear. Morality, in practice, is far from arbitrary.<br />
<br />
Now the argument can certainly be made that morality is not arbitrary precisely<i> because</i> God's character is not arbitrary- we only consider morality "fixed" because God's character is fixed. But I don't think this solves our problem, if only because we can <em>conceive</em> of a God with a different character than omni-benevolence (certainly the ancient Greeks did). Just because a being is omnipotent, it does not follow that his moral character is omni-benevolent- even if we are somehow justified in making this claim on God's character, we're still <em>constraining God's character to some external stanard of the moral law</em>. <br />
<br />
Put it another way- "Omni-benevolent" is a descriptive word that we apply to God <em>after his character is revealed</em>. If omnibenevolent simply meant "whatever God is", we wouldn't need to bother calling God omni-benevolent. Even if we make the claim that omnibenevolence is "part of God's nature", that's no help here. After all, cheerfulness is part of Steve's nature. It may be the case that Steve is perpetually and unchangeably cheerful, but the definition of cheerful does not derive from Steve. We don't look at Bill (also cheerful) and say "you're so Steve". Steve and Bill both share the "Cheerful" trait, and are even defined in relation to that trait, but that trait does not derive its meaning from them. "Cheerful" would still be a thing, even if they didn't happen to be cheerful. Much the same, we may claim God is omni-benevolent, but that is a very different thing than saying omni-benevolence derives its meaning from the character of God. If those two are the same, then talking about an evil (or even just imperfect) God wouldn't just be nonsensical, it would be syntactical jibberish.<br />
<br />
Put it yet another way- we like to call God omnipotent. But nobody makes the claim that <em>the definition of power</em> is "whatever it is that God has infinite amounts of". Power is a thing, whether or not there is a God to have it. We can say that God is by his very nature all powerful- and that may well be true- but it does not invalidate the concept of power in a framework that doesn't include God.<br />
<br />
I think the <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/03/exploring-stephen-laws-evil-god-challenge.html" target="_blank">Evil God problem</a> illustrates that "God", while perhaps being necessarily "good" by virtue of his omniscient nature (as Leah contends in that link), is still a logically seperable <em>concept</em> from "good" (even if God is necessarily good in Leah's framework, then He is being constrained by good, not the other way around). But I don't think we even need to appeal to that level of argument to get this point across to a Christian audience (since I suspect the evil God idea will strike many as fundamentally absurd). Instead, let's look at the story of Abraham. God directed Abraham to kill his only child in cold blood. This is pretty clearly a morally evil action to take. If you hear a news story about a women who kills her children because she thinks God told her too, you don't think "good for her, believing her faith so strongly", and you don't for a second question whether or not she was<i> actually doing as she was told</i> by God.<br />
<br />
When I've disussed this question with Christians, I've never heard any of them say that killing Issaac wouldn't have been wrong because <em>anything God says is by definition right</em>. Instead, they either point to the fact that God didn't actually make Abraham do it, or suggest the possibility of far-reaching consequences we're not capable of grasping (i.e. killing baby Hitler). In either case, we are saying that God simply would not order a senseless killing <em>without some good reason</em>. This is not a claim that God <em>is</em> morality, but rather that God <em>is always right</em> about morality- and since God knows more than us, and because he has the character of omni-benevolence, we are required to trust him completely. We are admitting here that the standard of morality is external to God- some things are right and some things are wrong, and God's character fits entirely into one of those categories. And again, even if his character <em>necessarily</em> fits into one of them, that is God being constrained by morality, not the other way around.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that the Christian is on no more solid footing here than the Atheist. Both are appealing to moral standards that have roughly the same metaphysical grounding. But here's the thing- I don't ultimately see this as a problem. It seems pretty straightforward to me, once you've arrived at a position of valuing human life and the human experience, to arrive at a morality that says "people matter, and what's good for people is morally good and what's bad for people is morally bad". The question that Christianity tries to answer (and where Atheism fails for me) is <em>why we should care about morality in the first place</em>? Coming up with morality is pretty easy, except in the most extreme of edge cases; convincing me why I should care about some arbitrary electrical signals passing through a semi-randomly arranged mass of protons and electrons is a much tougher deal.<br />
<br />
All the arguments I've read for secular morality (including the one I'm in the middle of from <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Believed-Reflections-Former-Missionary/dp/0578003880" target="_blank">Why I Believed</a></i>) point to rational self-interest as our reason for being moral. This is where they all lose me. Certainly rational self-interest is a tremendous motivator (the only thing I learned from my college economics class was the following dictum: "Incentives work"), but that's not why I <i>want </i>to be good (or rather, not why I want to want to be good). I want to be good because it's <i>the right thing to do</i>- not because of potential divine judgement, and not because it will benefit me in the end. Certainly my desire- and a reasonable basis for morality- are explicable in the secular vision. They're just totally, completely unsatisfying to me. It seems to be the case that once I recognize that morality is just a hard-wiring of my brain to prefer things beneficial to the group, my optimal strategy is to <i>actively override my moral intuitions</i>. I should be good when it suits me, in case others are watching, but in the case where I'm sure nobody will notice, there's absolutely no motivation for not doing what benefits me the most. I would certainly never donate anonymously, sacrifice myself for another, or anything else that my corrupted-hardware-brain might try to convince me to do out of some misplaced burden of evolutionary psychology. Wanting it to not be true is not an indication of it actually not being true- but man is that a <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/nihilism.html" target="_blank">depressing reality</a>Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-49987035569862168842012-05-27T22:52:00.002-07:002012-05-28T00:05:31.936-07:00Back from my "Vacation"Well, I survived my <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/ideological-turing-test.html" target="_blank">trip to nowhere</a>, only a few cuts and bruises the worse for it. I'm sure I learned something important out in the woods, I'm just not sure what yet. In the meantime, here some the things I did learn from this trip:<br />
<br />
-When the ranger says "Oh, nobody's been up that way yet this year", turn around and go home. Just leave.<br />
-Look at a topographical map before you plan your route, not after. And 3,000 vertical feet is a lot more than you think it is.<br />
-Bringing only powerbars, trail mix, and craisins for food might <i>sound </i>like a good idea, but those are appetizing for exactly one meal in a row.<br />
-If you get to the top of a snow-covered cliff, and your map directs you to go over it, don't. In a fight between your map and your common sense, always side with your common sense (there's some analogy to morality here, I'm sure of it...)<br />
-If you lose both your water bottles (one in a river, another in a swamp), an empty ziploc craisin container makes an excellent makeshift canteen. Also, free cranberry flavored water.<br />
<br />
I have quite a few entertaining stories, but none that I feel particularly compelled to log to the indelible annals of the internet. Most of them involve me being stupid and/or doing dangerous things.<br />
<br />
I'll be back to posting on a few of the metaphysical ideas I was ruminating on in the next couple of days. But in the meantime, the Ideological Turing Contest is in full swing over at unequally yoked- feel free to <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/05/all-entries-in-the-2012-atheism-round.html" target="_blank">head over there and check out the entries so far</a>.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-780889244594792492012-05-18T01:43:00.002-07:002012-05-18T01:43:54.618-07:00Ideological Turing TestA few months ago (back when I started this blog), I talked with my brother about God. He suggested that it might be worth my while to go "looking for God" by finding somewhere quiet and spending some time listening (my brother's a nature guy).<br />
<br />
Anyway, long story short, I planned a trip to Yosemite which has (surprise!) come due. I'll be gone all next week, so I won't be posting or replying to any comments.<br />
<br />
It's an interesting question as to whether or not this a good idea at all- particularly in light of <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/04/quasi-transhumanist-charismatic-christians.html" target="_blank">this post</a> over at unequally yolked. Look hard enough, and you're likely to find <i>something </i>(I ordered the book she was reviewing, and will definitely read it... someday)<br />
<br />
That being said, I don't think the answer is to stay at home and <i>think</i> your way to God (if he exists). So, better to do something than nothing, I guess.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I submitted an entry to Unequally Yoked's <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/05/sign-up-to-play-in-the-ideological-turing-test.html" target="_blank">Ideological Turing Test</a>. I'm both excited and nervous about this, since I seem to have the unfair advantage of having believed both sides- so it will be pretty embarrassing if/when I get caught not being able to articulate one of the two sides (though admittedly, quite a few of the readers over there have experience on both side of the fence). Leah should be posting the entries on wednesday or thursday of next week, and I encourage people to head over and check it out- bonus points for anyone who can spot mine.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-24410579041171546032012-05-15T00:32:00.001-07:002012-05-15T14:47:38.496-07:00After Skepticism<em>*NOTE: I'm treating whether or not the reader has reached the same conclusion as me, that "all metaphysical systems seem deeply flawed", as secondary to the content of this post. Regardless of whether of not you agree, "what do we do in this case?" is still an interesting question*</em><br />
<br />
So what do you do if every major metaphysical system you've looked at has insurmountable problems? Atheism can't explain <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/question-of-origin.html" target="_blank">where the universe came from</a> (<a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/question-of-purpose.html" target="_blank">or why we should care</a>). Christianity can't give us <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/deconverting-muslim.html" target="_blank">a real reason to believe</a> (<a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/against-faith.html" target="_blank">other than no reason at all</a>) and has a <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-view-of-bible-part-1.html" target="_blank">deeply flawed Holy Book</a>. Buddhism tells us passion is what's holding us back and utter detachment is the proper state of mind. Islam leads to societies of oppression and violence. Hinduism gave us the caste system. So what now? What happens after you <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/05/applied-skepticism.html" target="_blank">apply a skeptical heuristic</a> to the truth claims made by all the major metaphysical systems, and find them ALL wanting?<br />
<br />
It seems like we a few options hre:<br />
1. Pick the metaphysical system that seems most likely, believe the parts that you agree with, and reject the parts you don't<br />
2. Believe the parts that you agree with of every metaphysical system you come across<br />
3. Pick the metaphysical system that seems most likely to be true, and believe all of it's claims, even the ones that you can't justify belief in<br />
4. Reject every metaphysical system since they all seem to have insurmountable problems<br />
5. Keep looking. <br />
<br />
I'm going to deal with these one at a time.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>1. Pick the metaphysical system that seems most likely, believe the parts that you agree with, and reject the parts you don't</b><br />
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This is the approach taken by <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/weak-form-christianity.html" target="_blank">Weak Form Christianity</a> (though WFC doesn't so much reject them as it does ignore them). When I was a Christian, I had a fair amount of disrespect for this position. It does seem like a bit of a cop out- can we really trust only part of a religion? Either the religion is true or it's not- and it makes sense that someone starting a new religion would have enough insight into human behavior to get at least parts of it right. At the very least, it seems like your religion is now a reflection of what you know to be true, and not in itself a truth-telling thing. If we're going to accept that which we already agree with and reject that which we already disagree with, then why bother with a metaphysical system at all? The metaphysical system isn't informing our beliefs anymore, so it seems almost superfluous at this point. <br />
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This admittedly seems like a bit of an oversimplification. Weak Form Christianity, for example, isn't so much a rejection of general Christian teachings, but rather an admittance of ignorance as to the specifics. You can still believe the core of a religion wholeheartedly. But it does seem that if you reject specifics, you're rejecting the divine inspiration of that religion/denomination, and you're losing a fair bit of your basis for believing it to begin with.<br />
<b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b>2. Believe the parts that you agree with of every metaphysical system you come across</b><br />
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At this point, aren't you really just making up your own religion? At the very least, this method of belief definitely can't teach you new truth. It suffers from all of the shortcomings of the first approach, but has the additional advantage of exposing you to a broader base of truth (or at least gives you more perspectives to weigh), but has the disadvantage of losing any claim that it is or was ever divinely inspired. At least if you believe in Weak Form <i>something</i>, you can say that the underlying religion is God-inspired, if not accurate to the letter.<br />
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<b>3. Pick the metaphysical system that seems most likely to be true, and believe all of it's claims, even the ones that you can't justify belief in</b><br />
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...or rather, act as if this system is true, since <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/can-we-choose-what-we-believe.html" target="_blank">I'm not convinced you can rationally choose to believe something</a>. This, I think, is the option most people pick, though I'm not sure how many would admit to it. The problem is, this is <i>only</i> a good idea if what you're choosing to "believe" in happens to be right- and if you disagree with the specifics, it seems like we really can't be very confident in this fact.<br />
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But the real problem here is that you've given up any ability to think critically about your religion. Your saying that your religion is no longer beholden to your reason or experience- or at least, only parts of it are. Again, <i>it makes sense</i> that every metaphysical system has kernels of truth in it. Just because you find this particular metaphysical system to have more truth than the rest of them, that's not necessarily compelling- one of them <i>has</i> to more true than the rest, by pure virtue of the fact that they're different. <br />
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This seems awfully close to blind faith.<br />
<b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b>4. Reject every metaphysical system since they all seem to have insurmountable problems</b><br />
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In practice, these seems to me to look a lot like <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/nihilism.html" target="_blank">Nihilistic Atheism</a> (Obviously you can't really "reject everything" while you're still alive, because you still have to make decisions about what to do and why to do it). The best argument I can give against this option is that nobody in their right mind wants to live their life this way. That doesn't make it untrue, of course, but if it is true, then I start to question if we should even care- why not live in delusion if the truth is as horrible as Nihilism?<br />
<br /><br /><b>5. Keep looking</b><br />
<b><br /></b>This is an interesting one for me. I "kept looking" for God for about 2 years before leaving Christianity. I was asked repeatedly why I was "giving up". My answer was to ask another question- How long should I look for something I'm not finding before I stop looking? You can't say "forever", because if it's not actually there, you'll end up wasting your life being obsessed over a question that has no answer. But you also can't give up too soon, because it's not clear that if something were true, it would be obviously apparent. What's the right amount of time to look before giving up and just doing and believing whatever makes you happy? Six months? A year? A decade? The biggest problem is that there are essentially an infinite number of religions to choose from, and you could literally go your whole life without giving them all a fair try (heck, there's almost an infinite number of denominations just within Christianity).<br />
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<b>Conclusion</b><br />
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I'd be fascinated to hear what other people think is the right thing to do here. I honestly have no idea. I've thought each of them was the correct path at one point or another. At this point, I'm still in the "Keep Looking" stage, since there are a few mainstream religions I haven't given a legitimate chance to yet. But I'm not too far from having looked into and rejected all the major ones ("rejected" is perhaps too strong of a word. Mostly I'm just "still unconvinced"- doesn't mean I can't or won't be convinced later).Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-15769673148958229722012-05-07T23:39:00.002-07:002012-05-07T23:46:07.322-07:00Applied SkepticismSkeptics get a bad rap.<br />
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We need to differentiate between a Skeptic worldview (where we flat out reject everything) and a Skeptic epistemology, where we demand verification of any and all truth claims (both religious and otherwise). Skeptic epistemology is a moral imperative (religions- particularly Christianity- agree with me here. In general, they contain lots of warnings about false prophets and changes to scripture). I want to talk about what I see as the proper application of skepticism in our search for truth.<br />
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The first thing we have to realize (or rather admit) is that our perception of reality is untrustworthy. There are too many studies on human psychology that show us doing horribly irrational things for us to entertain the notion that what we <i>think</i> we know always matches with reality. Moreover, there are too many painfully real present-day examples of people doing absurd things in the name of their religion. So when is it appropriate to trust our senses, feelings, and beliefs, and when is it not?<br />
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There are a few instances that jump to mind here. If your belief in something is based on feelings, emotions, Faith, Divine Impartation of knowledge, an Infallible Leader, or any other objectively unverifiable basis, you have a problem: it's a virtual certainty that someone, somewhere (probably a great many someones) believe in a diametrically opposed truth <i>based on the same evidence</i>. The Christian claims divinely imparted belief? So does the Muslim. The Buddhist claims inner peace and joy as evidence of his religion? So does the Christian. Your specific belief may be unique, but the basis of your belief is not. So on what strength are you to say that your belief is well founded, but everyone else's is purely psychological? It seems like you're forced to pick one of two options- either everyone else is lying, or humans are capable of being utterly convinced of a truth (on the same basis that you are utterly convinced), and still be wrong.<br />
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If a claim demands action <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/" target="_blank">but makes no prediction</a>, you ought to be extremely suspicious. Such claims have historically been used as methods of control, but more to the point, you don't actually have any reason to believe them. Once they start making proscriptive claims about what you <i>ought</i> to do, they are now literally asking you to <i>bet</i> something on their truth. It's one thing to accept a claim as plausible (and "believe" it, in the weak Bayesian sense) on the strength of authority- you believe a friend who tells you your favorite sports team won. But once you have to take <i>action</i> on this belief (or abstain from action), your standard for belief (your critical Bayesian level, if you will) must increase <i>in proportion to the level of action required</i>. If a physicist tells me certain kinds of radiation are not harmful, I believe him. If he asks me to carry some of the glowing material, the standard of evidence I require increases a great deal.<br />
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The key thing i'm arguing for here is that we have to recognize the fundamental possibility that our truth-telling mechanisms are wrong. I say "fundamental" here in the sense that this possibility is always present, no matter what level of enlightenment, relationship with God, understanding of the universe, or epistemological epiphany we reach. Not only is it always <i>possible</i> that we're wrong, it's actually statistically <i>likely</i> that we're wrong. A claim of anything else is either a claim that you believe your truth more strongly than any other religion believes in its truth, or that you have a better truth-telling mechanism than they do (a claim that suffers greatly when your belief depends on Faith, emotion, etc). Science, it should be noted, claims the latter- that it has a better truth-telling mechanism (it's a pretty convincing claim).<br />
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The point here is that, as the relative extremity of the action required increases, so too should your requirement of evidence. And in fact, there are some things that might be true, but <a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Ethical_injunction" target="_blank">you should be so suspicious of them, that in practice you never actually believe them</a>. If a religious claim ultimately requires you to commit what you know to be a moral evil, you are <i>obligated</i> to reject the religious claim- even if it's true! Because our truth-telling mechanisms are untrustworthy, it's much, much more likely that you're wrong about what God is telling you than it is that God is actually telling you to slaughter all those innocent people.<br />
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So what's the takeaway here? First, most people aren't skeptical enough. Second, <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/against-faith.html" target="_blank">Faith is not valid evidence</a>. Third, whatever belief system you end up with, it must be <i>beholden to your moral principles</i>, not the other way around. It is wrong- both ethically and epistemologically- to subjugate your conviction of right and wrong to any authority other than your own. <i>You</i> are responsible for your actions. Should such a day come, <i>you</i> will stand before God on judgement day. And I can think of no other response that a benevolent God could have to someone who <i>knowingly did wrong</i> in his name than "How dare you?"Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-28649507263521881482012-04-30T22:13:00.000-07:002012-05-07T01:33:25.985-07:00Against Faith<em>*this post is a part of the <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/p/ats.html" target="_blank">Assuming the Supernatural</a> series*</em><br />
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Unfortunately there are a great many definitions of Faith (a few of which I'm actually ok with). Most arguments about Faith get derailed long before deliberations begin- they get derailed because of a fundamental difference the two people have in their definition of Faith. So I'm going to try to be as specific as possible here and avoid using the generic term "Faith." Instead, I'm going to talk about "contingent belief", "non-contingent belief", and "divinely imparted belief" as proxies for what most people mean when they talk about Faith<br />
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Contingent belief is the kind of Faith that I'm OK with. This kind of Faith is really just a different way of talking about weak Bayesian belief (I think its a mistake to call this "Faith" at all, because it seems to me so categorically different from the other types of Faith. But this is the definition some people use- particularly when <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/science-and-religion.html" target="_blank">trying to accuse science of requiring Faith</a>). It is a mental assent to a proposition that you are less than sure about, but it is necessarily <i>beholden to your future experiences</i>. Scientific theories all fit into this category. We're not 100% sure of <i>anything</i>, and if we find sufficient evidence against a theory, we will discard it. Moreover, we have (or ought to have) no emotional attachment to this kind of Faith, and having this Faith is neither virtue nor vice- it is simply applied logic.<br />
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Non-contingent belief is that belief which I cannot accept. The problem with non-contingent belief is that it separates our beliefs from reality. We are no longer tied down by experience or reason, but rather let loose to roam the plains of our own desires. To put it another way, if we allow ourselves non-contingent belief, how are we to decide <i>what</i> to believe without evidence? Surely there are a great many possible beliefs that we could hold without offering any defense for them. Why pick Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism? Why not pick "Jakeism", the religion of Jake, in which I am god and get to decide what is right and wrong according to my own whims? <br />
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I want to be clear that I don't think most religions fall into this category- but many do glorify such belief. The intelligent Christian believes because there are good arguments, and he is convinced of the historical accuracy of scripture, and he cannot make sense of life without the meta-ethical framework that Christianity provides. This man may well be wrong, but he is not believing without basing his conclusions on evidence. But when a religion exhorts its followers towards Faith- towards belief without evidence, or worse, belief<i> in the face</i> of evidence- my spider sense starts tingling. We ought not believe <i>anything </i>on this kind of Faith. If we find evidence or experiences that contradict our religious beliefs, <i>we should question our beliefs. </i>Either our beliefs are correct, and we will find good answers to our questions, or our beliefs are incorrect, and we will be one step closer to finding the correct beliefs.<br />
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What I want out of my epistemology is to become a more accurate predictor of reality. The only way non-contingent belief could accomplish this is if there were something that was true, but no evidence could be offered up for it. While it is conceivable that such truth exists, consider which is more likely- that someone claiming absolute truth without evidence actually has the truth, or that someone claiming absolute truth without evidence is wrong. Obviously, we <i>expect</i> you to have no evidence if you're wrong. You haven't differentiated yourself from other people claiming truth if you tell us that we need faith to believe you. I don't want arbitrary belief; I want belief based in reality.<br />
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But I think the best argument against non-contingent belief is the following: any non-contingent-belief-Faith you have derives from your belief in the Authority of something else (a holy scripture, a prophet, a tradition, etc.) which tells you to have Faith (or at least tells you the truth you ought to have Faith in). Your Faith can <i>never</i> be stronger than your belief in the Authority. Likewise, that belief in the Authority can never be stronger than your belief in whatever it is that gives your Authority-source it's Authority. After peeling back all the layers, there are only two places you can end up: experience, or reason. Your Faith <i>cannot</i> be stronger than your belief in experience and reason, because your Faith <i>derives itself</i>, through layers of abstraction, from this experience and reason. Otherwise, what you have is a <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/" target="_blank">floating belief</a>, not tied to any actual observable reality. If your Faith in the Authority is working in a feedback loop with the Authority proclaiming Faith, you need to take a serious look at your belief system, because you would believe it <i>no matter what it said</i>. You believe it simply because you believe it, and for no other reason. You are perpetuating the status quo for the simple reason that you already believe the status quo. And that's why non-contingent belief is such a great evil- because it is inescapable, even when its wrong.</div>
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This brings us to divinely imparted belief. I'm not sure what exactly I can say here, other than throwing up my hands and rolling my eyes. Fine. You believe you have divinely imparted belief. You don't need reasons, because you simply *know* something is true that the rest of us don't see. This is like the man who is convinced the world is one big dream of his, and he will be waking up any minute. Nothing you can say, nothing you can do will ever convince him otherwise. Divinely imparted belief is (most often) a veneer placed over a gaping hole in the reasonability of a religion. <br />
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Again, I want to be clear that I think divinely imparted belief is totally possible. But you ought to be so suspicious of it that you don't believe it, even if it is true, because you're not the only one claiming this. If other people can be mistaken about the level of certainty they ought to have in the divine origin of their beliefs, why can't you? It seems like hubris to claim that <i>we</i> have divinely imparted belief, which we can be sure of because it was divinely imparted, but <i>your</i> divinely imparted belief is purely psychological (and by the way, <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/deconverting-muslim.html" target="_blank">you should convert</a>).<br />
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Before closing this post, I should note that C.S. Lewis has a definition of Faith that I can totally get behind. He basically says that Faith is the ability to hold on to what you know to be true even when it doesn't seem true at the moment. Certainly mood, circumstance, and chance play a large role in our lives, and can definitely affect what we consider to be reasonable at a given time. If all we require of Faith is that it is a caution against impetuous overcorretive steering, then I'm on board- you shouldn't make big life decisions about what you believe in an instant. But if we're saying Faith can keep us from converting or deconverting long-term, even when we're convinced that the evidence is arrayed against us? I'm not buying it. That's what keeps people trapped in false religion.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-2920452363855217332012-04-28T18:13:00.001-07:002012-04-28T18:16:26.550-07:00What DO I Believe?<em>*this post is a part of the <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/p/ats.html" target="_blank">Assuming the Supernatural</a> series*</em><br />
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I've spent a lot of time talking about what I don't believe, and what I find difficult to believe in other religions. It only seems fair that I talk about what I do believe (at this point), as we can't just go along defeating other people's beliefs forever. <br />
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In one sense, these beliefs are not very scientific. In another, they quite are. They are the synthesis of my moral sensibilities and my observations about reality as a rational moral agent (and a substantial amount of modern Western culture that has found it's way in as well). They are (for the most part) distinct from <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-accepted-axioms.html" target="_blank">my axioms</a> of belief, but rather are the conclusions I draw from the application of my axioms to my life experience. Basically, these are the things that I would be looking for a metaphysical system to support if I'm to buy into it.<br />
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<strong>I believe in Reason</strong>- mostly because it seems to work. The universe is orderly, not out of necessity, but out of observation. And we can codify good methods of defining, discovering, and extrapolating that order to make predictions. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/" target="_blank">Reality agreeing with a belief system's predictions</a> is a necessary condition for me accepting that belief system.<br />
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<strong>I believe in Right and Wrong</strong>- that they are real and objective things. I believe that when societies or groups don't recognize the objective moral right and wrong (which is a historical reality), it is out of ignorance. It is because they don't fully understand their actions, or the effect their actions have on other people.<br />
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<strong>I believe in Love-</strong> I believe its more than hormones and herd instinct.<br />
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<strong>I believe in free will- </strong>I don't think we are destined to do anything. We make our own choices. If the world was any other way, I see no reason for this physical reality to exist at all. If the end is already set, why bother with this charade?<br />
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<strong>I don't care if there's an afterlife-</strong> Seriously, it seems really secondary to me. First, this reality is the only one I can be sure of. Second, I just don't see ceasing to exist as such a great evil. I'm not saying I reject the idea of an afterlife out-of-hand, just that any claim about the afterlife makes me suspicious, because it's a great method of control (not to mention being totally unverifiable). <br />
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<strong>I believe in freedom</strong>- personal, political, and economic. We ought to be be free to determine the outcome of our own lives. (obviously we can't live in a vaccuum, free from outside influences, but we can and should give as much autonomy as possible to the individual)<br />
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<strong>I believe everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they believe-</strong> I reject any religion or epistemology that threatens the non-believer or disallows interpretation and honest disagreements by its adherents<br />
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<strong>I believe in accepting and loving everyone, even those we disagree with-</strong> I'm not sure yet whether I agree with "loving your enemies", because I'm not even really sure what that means. But I am pretty sure we ought not make enemies with anyone if we can help it. Those that differ from us are still human, and worthy of human dignity and love. I like the way C.S. Lewis puts it- "But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less." Once you see another human as a moral agent just trying to maximize his own happiness, you begin to forgive that which would previously be unforgivable.<br />
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<strong>I believe in justice</strong>- Wrongdoers should be punished. This is not diametrically opposed to the "loving and accepting everyone" point. Justice is devoid of emotion. It is a recognition that actions have consequences, and that to encourage correct behavior we need to discourage incorrect behavior. "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen". But justice is more than this. I think, even if incentivizing people to not do bad things didn't work, I would still believe that wrongdoing should be punished.<br />
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<strong>I do not believe in faith-</strong> Here's the problem with faith: if we believe something on any strength other than the evidence, then we lose the grounding of our belief in reality. There are several definitions of faith, but I think they basically fall into two categories- blind faith and contingent faith. Contingent faith is not really "faith" at all- it's weak bayesian belief. I have "faith" in those I trust, because the evidence says they are trustworthy. If they continually fail at that standard, I will lose my faith in them. I cannot justify believing in any other conception of faith. (This is a topic that deserves a more considered discussion. I'll be writing a post on Faith soon)<br />
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<strong>I do not think humans are basically good. </strong><strong>I do not think humans are basically bad. </strong><strong>I think humans are basically free- </strong>it seems to me that we all have a great capacity for both. It is equally hard to be all-good as it is to be all-bad. It seems to be a common claim in religion that humans are all bad, and anything good we do is God, and anything bad we do is us. I think humans, with or without God, are capable of choosing to do the right thing.<strong> </strong><br />
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<strong>I do not believe in the authority of tradition</strong>- Tradition is useful because smart people have been thinking hard for thousands of years about the same problems we encounter today. But tradition cannot be authoritative- those who created tradition were no different, no better or worse, than we are today. If anything, they had fewer resources, had been exposed to fewer diverse belief systems, and had less scientific and historical knowledge of the world than we do. Moreover, adhering to tradition for the sake of tradition almost inherently slows down or outright prevents progress. I cannot and will not cede the authority to determine my beliefs to anyone other than myself. I am ultimately responsible for both my beliefs and my actions, so I need to take responsibility for verifying my beliefs against reality. There is obviously something more to be said if God has revealed something to specific people- those who had direct interaction with God do have a great deal more authority. But the standard of proof for me to believe this is astronomically high. I will cover my full view of tradition in a later post.<br />
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<strong>I don't believe any human is infallible</strong>- I cannot accept any claims of infallibility for living humans, because infallibility removes my right to question, criticize, and argue- those are some of our fundamental rights (and indeed, obligations) as humans. I'm suspicious of any religion that elevates its leader to "unquestionable" status for the same reason I'm suspicious of any country that has a president but no elections. (note that this doesn't disqualify Christianity, because Jesus was not really human in the sense that all the rest of us are- he was "all God and all Man". Whatever that means, its something fundamentally different than us)Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-74619052724803579462012-04-26T21:15:00.001-07:002012-04-30T22:18:38.536-07:00Assuming The Supernatural...At this point, I think I've enumerated most of my good arguments against Theism in general. And I'm finding that, when considering different religions and different sects within the same religion, I'm getting bogged down by questions of metaphysics rather than questions of theology. While the two are by no means mutually exclusive, I do think there's been an element of not-taking-this-religion-stuff-seriously in a lot of my posts, and more to the point, in a lot of my thinking.<br />
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The truth is, I'm about 50/50 on whether or not I think there's a "supernatural" anything. The half of me that believes in the supernatural is the same half that <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/nihilism.html" target="_blank">rejects Nihilism</a>. The half of me that doesn't thinks we're meaningless bags of atoms hurtling towards our inevitable doom. The second, it turns out, is a much less interesting half.<br />
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I'm going to try and make an effort over over the next few weeks, starting with my next post, to consider the case where I am convinced that there is <em>something</em> more than the physical world, and the problem has been reduced to deciding which of these religions, if any, seem to be the best fit with my observations and reason. I'm going to mark these posts in the "ATS" category (assuming the supernatural), so I don't have to write this long paragraph every time about how I'm arguing for things with only a 50% buy-in.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-51739386683427072172012-04-25T20:53:00.001-07:002012-04-26T11:27:23.513-07:00Deconverting a MuslimThe question that seems to have generated the most interesting results for me in conversations with Christians is "On what basis should a Muslim deconvert?" The power of this question is that it forces you to consider what <i>would</i> make you deconvert from a religion, while separating you from the emotional ties you have with your own. It implicitly asks you if you hold yourself to the same standard you hold other religious believers (who you presumably think have the wrong idea about God, and should convert).<br />
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I've been surprised by how many Christians have answered this the same way I did three years ago, but arrived at a totally different conclusion. My answer was that there was no standard I could apply to both them and myself that would declare my religious experience to be true and their religious experience to be false. I had to admit that, had I been born a Muslim and maintained my current standards for belief, I would have forever remained a Muslim. What surprised me about the Christians who echoed my sentiments was that their response was not to doubt the validity of their belief. Rather, their response was to thank God that they had been born into a Christian environment. Several times I have heard the phrase "if I had been born a Muslim, I think I would probably still be a Muslim", and was astonished that it was not immediately followed by a recanting of Christianity.<br />
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This seems so logically inconsistent to me that I don't really know where to start. This is a confession that your beliefs are not based on reality, but on <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/problem-of-geography.html" target="_blank">Geography</a>. This is a confession that your beliefs are not objectively true, but rather culturally convincing. This is a confession that your standards of belief are so weak that you cannot even differentiate yourself from your principle rival (globally speaking) that claims to offer a contradictory version of truth. And most important, it seems a confession that there is no reason anyone should choose Christianity over Islam, because their relative plausibility is based on your culture rather than the truth. I just can't get my head around someone admitting to all this, and being <i>thankful they were born into this particular arbitrarily held belief system</i>- as if the Muslim would not say the exact same?<br />
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I honestly think Islam is the best argument against Christianity. It falsifies a lot of the core assumptions of Christian apologetics- that a group of men two thousand years ago wouldn't have died for a belief unless it was real, that God reveals himself in an active and unmistakeable way, that miracles and fulfilled prophecy are convincing and sufficient to prove a religion correct. Moreover, it shows that people can be absolutely convinced that their religious beliefs and experiences are true- but be totally wrong.<br />
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My point is, if you don't have a <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2010/09/why-i-dont-believe-unconvincing-conversions.html" target="_blank">good filter that passes your religion and fails every other religion</a>, then I think you need to reevaluate your standard of belief. This is why I placed such a premium on the <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/04/define-relationship.html" target="_blank">Personal Relationship</a> claim made by Christianity, because it was just one such differentiator. But in the end, that didn't bare itself out in my life.<br />
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I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions about what kind of filter we might apply that passes one and only one religion- or an argument of how we're justified believing one of the two religions without such a filterJakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-39085210965327353612012-04-23T22:35:00.002-07:002012-04-23T22:35:43.292-07:00Belief as a SelectorBelief seems to me an arbitrary (and really quite odd) choice for the selecting function of salvation. There seem to be a great many good people honestly seeking the truth and either not finding it, or finding contradicting versions of it. But the one thing that (almost) all religions claim is that belief in their specific version of truth is both necessary and sufficient for salvation.<br /><br />This is highly suspicious to me. Why is belief the ultimate good? It's highly subjective, wildly inaccurate, and easily manipulated. It's a lot less reliable than, say, how hard a person tries to be good. Or even how well that person succeeds at being good. This makes no sense if a religion is actually true. But it makes a lot of sense if religions are human constructs meant to manipulate people. Just like states need to instill a (totally unreasonable) sense of nationalism in their citizens, so too do religions need to convince everyone of belief as the selector. It is the only method by which religion can procreate, and evolutionarily speaking, it makes perfect sense that the only religions that have survived are those that demand the strict belief of their adherents and the proselytization of the infidels. <div>
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The problem, or rather the great genius, of organized religion is that it makes itself the only unquestionable reality. I can't tell you how hard it was for me to get out from under the thumb of the terror that I might go to hell. The combination of belief as a selector and fear as a motivator is incredibly powerful, because its self-reinforcing. The more you believe, the more afraid of hell you are, and the more afraid of hell, the more you believe. It's not until you release your fears (or plow right through them) that you're free to even think critically about your religion- for nothing is more frightening to the true believer than deconversion. And any religion that holds onto converts by fear is one I want no part of. (To the Christian who feels antagonized, I ask that you consider Islam. Is this not one of your primary complaints about the religion that it rules by fear? Well, this is certainly one of the primary complaints of many Atheists against Christianity as well. So now we've established the problem is real, and we're just "Haggling over the price", as it were)<div>
<br />Leah over at unequally yolked recently <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/">posted the following</a> in a discussion (roast?) of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism">Unitarian</a> (and specifically <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalist">Universalist</a>) theology:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
In his discussion with the Universalist minister, York pressed his sparring partner on the boundaries of membership in the Unitarian church. York said that if he committed adultery, he would no longer be a Mennonite – he would have excommunicated himself. He wanted to know if Unitarians had any equivalent acts. I was really surprised he thought the dividing line between people in a particular religious tradition and heathens was their acts. With my crypto-Catholic sensibilities, I don’t see how an action could strip you of your identity as a believer. Bad acts make you a bad whatever-you-are, but only divergent beliefs actually cut you off from the community, since they preclude seeking healing from that church. </blockquote>
<br />I think my problem with this is the idea that "healing from that church" is what gets you into heaven. That seems to me so blatantly manipulative. Or perhaps that's too strong- it seems to leave itself open to blatant manipulation (and indeed, the Catholic Church is guilty of this throughout much of its history). My sensibilities get itchy any time someone ends a sentence with "or else".</div>
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Two more points I'd like to note in the interest of fairness. First, I'm not sure if "healing from the church gets you into heaven" is what Leah is actually arguing for as the rational framework for religion (in this case, Catholicism). It seems just as likely that she's pointing out that your beliefs are what delineate you into different denominations, not your actions. I don't take issue with that sentiment at all. Differentiation is not the same as discrimination. What I take issue with is my interpretation of the last sentence, that somehow the corporate body of the church (whether Catholic or other) is responsible for your salvation.</div>
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The second point is that, while I find this framework distasteful, that doesn't make it untrue. Just because I see huge problems with belief being the selector of salvation, doesn't mean that it's not. I'm arguing against the arbitrary choosing of belief as a selector, but I don't really have a metaphysical basis from which to argue. The only cogent way to talk about this is to assume the position of God and make declarations about what does or doesn't make sense. But if we're to assume a God in order to make our argument, then surely we have lost some basis for criticizing him. I guess my point is, this seems like a good reason to be <i>distrustful</i> of organized religion. But it seems like a very poor reason to <i>conclude</i> that God is not real.</div>
</div>Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-88511472040114165002012-04-21T21:07:00.001-07:002012-04-21T21:15:49.996-07:00The Paralysis of ChoiceI'm not sure how many people suffer from this, but I am absolutely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis" target="_blank">paralyzed by choice</a>. <br />
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I've had to train myself to make arbitrary choices just to get anything done. People who know me well know that when confronted with a mostly trivial choice (like where to go for dinner), I simply choose one option, with no rhyme or reason. Part of this is because I think people usually already know what they want beneath the layers of pro/con analysis. When a friend is struggling between two relatively equal options, I will boldly declare "Option A!". Typically the response I get is either "yeah, let's do that!", or "no, I want to do the other one!". The response is rarely continued indecision.<br />
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But the other reason I make an arbitrary choice is that it's impracticle to do extended decision analysis on every trivial decision. My natural inclination is to figure out all the tradeoffs offered by each of my options, and try to make the right decision. But the consequences of making the incorrect dinner choice are negligible compared to the amount of time you'd have to spend making the "right" choice- particularly in matters of taste, where there is no obvious definition for the "right" choice. <br />
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But my indicision extends a lot further than this. I went to a drive through the other day, and my total was $8.40. I gave the guy a $10 bill, a quarter, a dime, and a nickle. He came back and gave me two $1 bills and a nickle. I looked at him confused. He said "you gave me a quarter and two dimes". I knew this wan't the case, but after a few seconds of arguing, I just gave up (he was <i>positive</i> he owed me 5 cents, and it didn't seem worth it to keep arguing). But as I was pulling out, I got to thinking about my relative certainty that I gave him a dime and a nickle, not two dimes. Could I be wrong? Absolutely I could. I've done stupid things like that in the past, not looking closely enough at what I was doing. I was 99% sure of myself when I first gave him the change, but I was somewhere between 90% and 95% sure I was right after he argued with me. So far, so good- I got some new input and updated my bayesian priors. It just so happens that I trust myself a lot more than I trust random-drive-through-guy.<br />
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But then I got to thinking on how much I would <em>bet</em> on the fact that I gave him a dime and a nickle. Would I bet $100? Or $1000? Or my whole life's savings? I realized that, even though I <i>felt</i> very sure I was correct, I still wouldn't bet any amount of money that I wouldn't be totally fine with losing. When I did my decision analysis, I cared a lot more about the difference between the end states than I did about the liklihood of each of these states actually happening. I cared about my maximum gain and maximum loss a lot more than I cared about my expected value.<br />
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My point is that, while I tend to implicitly trust my own intuitions when it comes to <i>claiming</i> truth, I tend to doubt them quite a bit when it comes to <i>acting</i> on truth. When I have to make a substantive choice based on my beliefs (a choice that involves actual risk and reward), I find that the very presence of someone telling me I'm wrong with absolute conviction is enough to confuse my decision making engine. It seems that I just tell myself I'm 95% sure- but my actions say otherwise.<br />
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I suspect you know where this is going, but I'll finish the thought anyways. The parallels between this and religion are pretty obvious. We're bombarded on all sides by people telling us they know the truth- entirely, completely, almost comically assured that they are correct- and each of these people is pulling us in a different direction. Any confidence I had in my conclusions evaporates as soon as I meet another (seemingly reasonable) person who believes quite the opposite.<br />
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I find that I can pick my way through this minefield much better on matters of fact (the historical nature of the old testament, for example) than I can on matters of personal experience. Our reason is so colored by our experience that its difficult to say which religion is even being reasonable, much less which, if any, is right. Religion tell me that this is the point where faith takes over. Science tells me (and my own natural inclination is) that a retreat to faith in the face of uncertainty is the surest path to being wrong.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-32018199605271007502012-04-16T23:54:00.000-07:002012-04-16T23:54:20.994-07:00Weak Form ChristianityI just had the most liberating conversation with a Christian I've had in a very long time.<br />
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Almost all the Christians I know have been Christians their whole lives. I just had coffee with a friend who didn't become a Christian until her freshman year of college. One of my favorite things about her is that she doesn't speak <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=christianese" target="_blank">Christianese</a>- she just talks about things the way they are.<br />
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She has what appears to me (and probably most career Christians) an odd faith. I'm labeling it Weak Form Christianity (WFC), not because it is inferior, but rather in the same way we talk about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis" target="_blank">Weak Form Efficiency</a>.</div>
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To summarize my understanding of the belief, it goes something like this: It is self evident that we are moral agents with free will. As such, there must be something more than the physical. This world and everything in it- emotional, intellectual, and relational- points towards a God as that something more. Moreover, it points toward a <i>relational</i> God, a God who values love, who values self-sacrifice, who values altruism. The Christian God is unique among all the forms of supernatural that have been proposed by humanity. In particular, it is the only religion that offers us both an explanation and a narrative for the value of love, self-sacrifice and altruism. It is the only religion that says that we simply cannot earn, fight, claw, scratch, or otherwise find our way to God. Instead, it speaks of God coming to us in the ultimate act of love and sacrifice through the life, death, and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. <br />
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But the difference between WFC and traditional Christianity is that this is pretty much all WFC claims. It doesn't claim any knowledge of <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/problem-of-geography.html" target="_blank">whether people from other religions can make the cut</a>. It makes no claims about the <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-view-of-bible-part-1.html" target="_blank">infallibility of the Bible</a>. It makes no claims about <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/supernatural-relationship-vs.html" target="_blank">what sort of relationship</a> you're supposed to have with God. All these are left as exercises for the reader, as it were. (I want to point out that WFC is distinct from the "lukewarm" Christianity that is fairly common in America today. WFC can be held with great conviction, and believers can live a life wholly commited to God even without claiming definitive knowledge of the specifics of God)</div>
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Essentially, this is an argument that Christianity is true because it just <i>sounds</i> true. It meets our (admittedly western) expectations of what a God would/could/should look like given the moral intuitions and subjective experiences we have in this world. And it gives us a model on which to base our actions and attitudes- a way to live our lives that has meaning and purpose (and is not self-contradictory).<br />
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To be fair, WFC is not a particularly well developed world view. It doesn't explain a lot of things, and it is perfectly comfortable ignoring the problems created by the Biblical doctrines of Christianity. But then again, it sort of just <i>works</i>. And let me be clear, I'm not sure if it's true, but I do think it works. I've seen it work, both in myself and in the lives of others. It makes you a "better" person. It makes you a loving person, a generous person, a person less concerned about yourself and more concerned about fixing this world that we've broken so badly.<br />
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Oddly enough, I find WFC much more compelling than traditional Christianity. The more I study, the more convinced I become that we simply can't know the specifics of God with any sort of certainty. Is baptism necessary for salvation? Transubstantiation or Consubstantiation? Is Homosexuality a sin or rejected because of a cultural construct in the time of the Bible? I don't know. An honest Christian can't claim to know either (though they could claim a belief or educated guess). But many versions of Christianity promote these to the role of core doctrines- if not contingencies of salvation, at least contingencies of a "proper" Christian belief. With so many separate-but-equally-supported belief systems (some internal to Christianity, some external), I find myself rejecting the idea that it would be possible to arrive at the correct conclusion even if one of them really is true. And WFC does not suffer from this criticism.</div>
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I think the real attraction of WFC, however, is that it gives us a basis for living a better life, while leaving open the possibility that we have no idea what we're doing. It's an acknowledgment only of the things that seem intuitively obvious, and an extrapolation of those things into a religious ideology. It doesn't make nearly so many unverifiable claims as other forms of the religion.</div>
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There are obvious problems with WFC, however (lest the reader think me a convert). Picking the parts you like and rejecting the parts you don't is almost never a good idea (whether its in a religion, a person, or anything else). While WFC does not suffer from as many unverifiable claims as the rest, is does suffer from a few. It makes some pretty big assumptions, going from "Moral Law" to "Omnipotent Benevolent Personal Relational Deity" without blinking. It makes even fewer substantive claims than traditional Christianity- if Christianity is unfalsifiable, WFC is even more so. But I think the biggest argument against WFC is that it's pretty clearly incomplete. Nobody really believes this vague generalist view of God.<br />
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Interestingly, WFC seems to be the doctrine most Christians turn too when cornered by any of the (seemingly insurmountable) problems with the religion. They invoke the "God works in mysterious ways" argument (one of my least favorite things in the world), and then say "But that's not the point of Christianity. Christianity is about...", and they go on to expound WFC. But very few Christians actually admit to believing only WFC. They still hold to these ancillary claims and traditions that seem to have no basis, particularly if WFC is the only thing that really matters. <br />
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I honestly suspect this is an issue of ignorance within the church. I have yet to talk to a Christian who has seriously considered in their own life all the arguments I have against the infalliability of the Bible, or the problem of Geography, or the basis on which Muslims should deconvert. No one has given me even close to a satisfactory answer on any of them, and when confronted with these arguments, they retreat to WFC- but they never actually deal with the issues at hand. And this seems to me a damning piece of evidence. It seems to me that the Christians I know (even the ones I respect) live in a state of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance" target="_blank">cognitive dissonance</a>- they haven't really followed the conclusions of their religion to the logical end. To be fair, I hadn't either. When I did, I rejected my formulation of Christianity. <br />
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Let me pause here and say that I don't legitimately think I'm living without cognitive dissonance. I think it's something everybody deals with, as nobody has come up with a seriously liveable world view that does not contain at least a few contradictions and idiosyncracies. That said, we ought (and here I go irrationally prescribing things again) to examine ourselves for this bias at every turn. We should NOT be ignoring contradictions in our belief system; rather, we should admit them and attempt to rectify them with reality. And it frustrates me when Christians don't do this, and instead rely on the boogeyman of epistemlogical debates- "We can't understand God"</div>Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-82071772064185900902012-04-15T12:22:00.001-07:002012-04-15T12:22:56.122-07:00The Power of GraceThis is pretty similar to my <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/divinity-of-love.html" target="_blank">divinity of love</a> argument, so I won't spend too much time talking about the Power of Grace. But I do think it's worthwhile to extend this idea that some emotions and experiences just don't make a whole lot of sense without a supernatural. They do not have objective value outside of a supernatural framework, but more than that, they don't even have a satisfactory explanation outside of the supernatural.<br />
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I think the Power of Grace is one of these things. Anyone who has ever been extended true grace, or has seen someone else extended true grace, has seen the powerful effect if can have. It can turn bitter enemies into fast friends literally overnight. It can absolutely free someone from prejudice, from hate, from emotional damage that has haunted them for years. It creates an instantaneous bond that supersedes all kinds of other biases and predispositions (including legitimate ones).<br />
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I don't think I'm claiming anything extraordinary here. I'm not sure how much time I should spend trying to convince you of the power of grace, because I'm not sure how many people actually doubt how powerful grace is (one of the curses of growing up Christian, I fear, is that I don't know what vocabulary non-Christians use for these things, and to what extent they're accepted as givens). At the very least, we have all seen those movies where the hero extends grace to the villain, and the villain is profoundly changed by it.<br />
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The question, then, becomes whether or not this makes sense outside of a supernatural explanation. I tend to say no. I don't see a conceivable evolutionary reason for grace to be so powerful. And I don't think it stops here- we can say the same for honor, duty, humor, hope, meaning, <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/question-of-purpose.html" target="_blank">purpose</a>, and probably some more experiences I can't think of right now. Can these be explained by evolutionary psychology? I don't know. Maybe. I have a really hard time claiming that <i>anything</i> is unexplainable by evolutionary psychology, including emotional experiences that we don't observe in reality. And if I'm going to hold it to the same standard that I'm holding religion, that means evolutionary psychology isn't actually making any claims at all. This is one of my principal complaints against Christianity- it can be warped to explain any fact, therefore it makes no predictions and is totally unfalsifiable. So as much as I'm nervous about claiming that something "can't be explained" by evolution, I think I'm even more nervous with claiming that <i>anything</i> can be explained by evolution.</div>Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-54148564808095267252012-04-10T20:23:00.000-07:002012-04-10T20:23:54.347-07:00Define "Relationship"...I had lunch with an old college friend the other day, and he brought out two points that I haven't covered yet that I thought were worth discussing. I'll talk about the Power of Grace in my next post, but today I want to talk about what exactly Christians mean when they say that <a href="http://thoughtfulatheist.blogspot.com/2012/03/supernatural-relationship-vs.html" target="_blank">God desires a "relationship" with us</a>.<br />
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My friend pointed out that when we talk about having a relationship with God, we tend to talk about it in the same terms we talk about our own relationships with other people. We tend to cram God into the little hole we have carved out for what a relationship should look like. But there is a problem here. This approach assumes that our relationship with God should look similar to the relationships we have with other people. It assumes we have any idea what a relationship would look like between two beings differing in consciousness the way we differ from God. This isn't like our relationship with another person- not even like our relationship with a dog, or an ant, or anything else we can think of. We really have no model for what a "relationship" with God should or even possibly could be like. But yet we're surprised (and indeed offended) that we don't have a "two directional" relationship with God (this was my single biggest complaint with Christianity, and is certainly the biggest reason I walked away)<br />
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Now I see both a big problem and a big relief for Christianity in this statement. The problem is that after all the research I've done, and all the Christians I've talked to, I still can't find a consensus about what Christians mean when they talk about having a relationship with God. Most individuals I talk to end up admitting that they don't in fact feel God's presence in their day-to-day lives. If Christianity can't even tell us what it means when it talks about a relationship with God, then Christianity isn't really making any claim here at all. Moreover, this makes any attempt to verify the existence of this relationship fundamentally impossible (even in the most subjective sense)<br />
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But there is also relief here. If we <em>don't</em> feel this relationship, perhaps that's because we don't know what a relationship with a being so different from ourselves feels like? Perhaps a relationship with him doesn't <em>feel</em> like anything? The problem with this argument, of course, is that the relationship the Old Testament God demonstrated with Moses, the Israelite people, and the prophets in general seems to be exactly the kind of relationship we expect from God- two directional, present, and leaving no doubt of its reality. The kind of relationship we get seems quite different- one directional, full of ethereal vagueness, and closer to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization" target="_blank">self-actualization</a> than meaningful dialog.<br />
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So what's the takeaway here? I think we need to answer a different question first: do we require an active and present God in order to believe in a particular religion? My inclination is that if God is active and present, then there should be no doubt for his believers (and almost every serious believer I've talked to has struggled with doubt in some form or another). Moreover, there should be no way for someone like me, who <em>wants</em> to believe, to arrive at the conclusion that God simply isn't there. So if our answer to this question is "yes", then I think I have an insurmountable problem with Christianity. Unless and until I have a supernatural experience with God (some "other half" to my prayers), I cannot take Christianity to be true. But if our answer is "no", then I think we must turn to what the Bible says. If Christianity does indeed claim this kind of relationship for its followers, then I'm stuck once again. But if it does not, then I don't think I'm justified in demanding it. It seems reasonable to me that the God of the universe would not feel particularly inclined to converse with me.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2085794492730642986.post-59603770745803135412012-04-07T00:28:00.004-07:002012-04-07T00:28:50.541-07:00Reason is Not EnoughReason alone is not enough. It took me a really long time to realize that. And a big part of my journey has been predicated on the idea that reason can conclusively differentiate truth from not truth.<br />
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Allow me to stop and clarify, because I mean something extremely specific here: what I mean is that if you were only allowed to use reason, you could only deduce a priori truths. You could formalize logic. You could do a fair bit of math. But that's about as far as you could possibly go.<br />
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But surely this is not surprising. All of our modern scientific knowledge is a synthesis of reason and experience- science is itself predicated on empiricism. Empiricism is in fact entirely divorced from reason (in a sense)- our deductions must be verified by experience, not the other way around. We don't theorize about the world based on logic and create laws that apply to nature; rather we observe nature and from that deduce its laws.<br />
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But there is one more very real sense in which knowledge does not flow from reason alone. We cannot ever be entirely sure of our own reason. This took me a long time to admit- ironically, I realized it through empiricism. My rationality has failed me too many times to be trusted. My view of the rationality of religion has changed (more than once) over the last five years.<br />
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Now I'm definitely not advocating for giving up rationality here. I certainly don't think that we as humans have a more reliable method for determining truth in the absence of direct observation. But I am advocating a somewhat tempered view of our reason. I think atheists tend to glorify reason as a proxy for truth- and I think <i>properly applied</i> reason does lead to truth, in the domains it is capable of addressing. But I'm not so sure how confident we can be in our own application of reason, and I'm not entirely sure as to what that reason-addressable domain is. To put it another way, I think logic and reason are the <i>strongest</i> way we can know truth. But they are not a foolproof way. And they are not the only way.Jakehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08783389718716811793noreply@blogger.com1