I see you tracked down my blog...Yes, I did. Thought I should know who I'm talking to. I particularly liked the post about Venus. It's a pity that it rises so early in the morning right now - close to the sun.
The first desktop PC I wrote a program for would have been on a Vic20 in, oh, 1978 I think... These days when I write any code at all, it's almost always to code up some algorithm I've been thinking about into R. I wrote some today actually - to investigate the possibility of a new algorithm I came up with this week to deal with a particular issue at work.That is fantastic! I remember the VIC20. We had a Spectrum, but only later. I haven't used much R. Is it worth learning?
> Because Christianity makes the most sense to meMost sense compared to atheism, Islam and Judaism mostly. Although I would always have ticked the "Christian" box if I was asked, I didn't always hold the beliefs I do now. During my teens I went from not really believing in God, through a type of deism and, to my surprise, to theism. While I certainly don't claim to know everything, I do feel comfortable with what I believe.
Most sense compared to what? Have you really done a comparison?
Have you put effort into studying other religions? Or into whether you can make sense of the world with no religion?I guess in atheism's case, I've read quite a few books: Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, or on the more thoughtful side, Steven Jay Gould (who I actually like), Anthony Flew, and some Mackie - and obviously any Christian on the internet has a constant stream of atheists trying to deconvert them, so I feel like I've heard most arguments before these days. Islam I mostly know from people trying to convert me, and listening to a few lecture series online.
How about you? What type of theist were you? Have you seriously considered other major worldviews?
Really? Christianity says next to nothing about most of the world we see.I guess we'll have to disagree on that. Just as a couple of examples: It makes good sense of morality, and why there's reason, hope and purpose in life - and how that is grounded in reality. It makes good sense to me why we should expect to find order and consistency that's required to do science - and why we should expect that science should work in the first place. I guess you don't care about these, but for me it makes sense why God's promises to Abraham came true, of Jesus, and how we can relate to God not based on philosophical speculation.
In contrast, on atheism, I don't see any reason to expect to see what we do see. I don't see a worthwhile answer to nihilism (feel free to suggest one), and the answers often seem to be internally inconsistent. I see all sorts of claims being made on the basis of atheism- which have far-reaching consequences- but there is no evidence that they are actually true. Dawkins, for example, claims (in the last chapter of River out of Eden) that at base there's no good or evil, and that all events of life (both bad bus crash, and also anything good) are meaningless. Despite their wide consequences, I don't see anything other than assumption backing these claims. Some simple other simple questions, you might like to answer are, why, based on atheism, should we expect that there even something rather than nothing? Why should we expect that the universe be ordered? Why do humans have intrinsic value?
It's the position of a skeptic.I think that there's a sliding scale between skepticism on one end (eg. denying holocaust, and the moon landings) on one end, and gullibility (eg. the unicorns you mention) on the other. If denying the moon landings is a 1 and new agers are a 10, where would you put yourself on the scale? Do you think it is important to believe things which are true or only to reject things which are false?
You seem to judge that the existence of God is incredibly unlikely ("extraordinary"), even before we even begin to consider the evidence. Why?
I think I'll have to stop there for now. I always feel on these topics that we've just touched the surface. Hope things are good with you Efrique, and I'll reply to the rest when I can - hopefully in the next day or two.
Part 1
ReplyDelete> The first desktop PC I wrote a program for would have been on a Vic20 in, oh, 1978 I think... These days when I write any code at all, it's almost always to code up some algorithm I've been thinking about into R. I wrote some today actually - to investigate the possibility of a new algorithm I came up with this week to deal with a particular issue at work.
> That is fantastic! I remember the VIC20. We had a Spectrum, but only later.
In retrospect, I may be misremembering. There was a Vic20 but the very first one I wrote code on may have been something less well known.
> I haven't used much R. Is it worth learning?
If you do statistical calculations, or produce statistical graphics, I definitely think so. There's a bit of a hump to get over compared to other things (it's harder to learn than C or MATLAB, for example), and it has some quirks, but having learned (to a modest extent at least) to take advantage of its way of doing things, it's very concise and powerful. And there are thousands of packages, some of which are very useful.
I say hump advisedly - it's reasonably easy to get started and do some really basic stuff, but pretty soon there's a great deal to learn before you make more progress. I think the rewards have been worth the effort, but there was a fair bit of effort.
The frequency with which I can not just answer a question, but *demonstrate* it almost instantly is very useful. For common statistical things (and some not very common things), it has an *immediacy* that's very intoxicating. But the hump is definitely there.
> Most sense compared to atheism, Islam and Judaism mostly.
Abrahamic religions only?
Have you read much of the Quran? (if we allow a similar degree of handwaving as is usually applied to the bible, in terms of being able to say some parts aren't literal, or the correct interpretation isn't the simplest, most obvious one), by what reasoning is it less convincing?
By my lights, deism is a subset of theism (in the sense of theism as belief in at least one god). I have seen other senses for the word theism, though; I guess you're taking one of those.
> I guess in atheism's case, I've read quite a few books: Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, or on the more thoughtful side,
I'm not sure which books you refer to here, since they each have quite a few, but I assume in Dawkins case at least you mean to refer to *The God Delusion*, and perhaps in Hitchens case to *God is Not Great*?
(Had you read none of those, I wouldn't have suggested you had a need to do so.)
In any case, that's good going, but I wasn't so much looking for what you'd read by atheists as what kind of understanding you'd arrived at, if any, by contemplation of whether there's a need to invoke any kind of supernatural explanations at all. I think you cover this sufficiently in your later discussion, since your questions make it fairly clear.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteHere's a quote from a story by Scott Aaronson that gets somewhere near to what I am getting at, and I think has some relevance for someone trained in science (most particularly the reference to Russell):
To be a truth-teller as I understand it one must also possess a fanatical, consuming desire to understand the world as it really is, and a concomitant abhorrence of vagueness and mysticism. When Richard Feynman says the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, for you are the easiest person to fool; when Carl Sagan demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims; when Richard Dawkins asserts that astrologers should be taken seriously, enough so to be jailed for fraud; when Bertrand Russell wishes to propose for the reader's favourable consideration the doctrine that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no reason whatever for supposing it true — they are expressing the ethic of the truth-teller.
Feel free to correct a misconception on my part, but it would seem to me that if one is thinking as deeply as you would appear to be, to put aside ordinary skepticism (the kind you're supposed to apply in science) would require some extraordinary evidence that supernatural explanations were necessary and that natural explanations simply could not suffice.
> Steven Jay Gould
Which work(s)? I've read a number of his popular science books, but that's not related to atheism
> Anthony Flew
Interesting. What in particular?
> Mackie
I have almost no familiarity with Mackie's writing at all (you mean J.L.Mackie, the Australian philosopher, right?).
I wouldn't mind taking a look at his book on ethics some time.
> obviously any Christian on the internet has a constant stream of atheists trying to deconvert them
I suspect this is an overgeneralization; I keep running into Christians online who seem surprised to discover that actual living, breathing, atheists exist. I accept that you have had such experiences - if you're prepared to do things like post to r/atheism, you would likely be inundated.
> so I feel like I've heard most arguments before these days.
I am not entirely sure how one even argues *for* atheism. To me it's simply the position of a skeptic.
> How about you? What type of theist were you?
I was Presbyterian, which became part of the [Uniting Church](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniting_Church_in_Australia) when I was a teenager. We didn't go to church much at all, but we had (and it's still the case, at least in the three states I'm directly familiar with) weekly religious classes in school, all through primary school and the first few years of secondary school. I read the bible cover to cover before I was ten, and again a few years later (though I skipped the genealogies the second time, like it says to in the bible - unfortunately, after you've read almost all the genealogies).
I went to various churches at different times as a young adult, with various people, but by then I had become agnostic theist, and eventually agnostic deist.
I investigated a number of religions at this time - Islam, Bahai, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Wicca, and I have subsequently learned a moderate amount about Judaism - to the extent that I've been addressed a couple of times in Hebrew by people assuming that I am Jewish. I (mostly) know my hadass from my etrog.
(Oh, I guess I had a passing familiarity with ancient Greek religion from earlier, having read a bunch of the mythical stories as a kid.)
I came to see that I had no better basis for the beliefs I had grown up with than any other religion. I believed things for no better reason than it was what the people around me believed.
(Damn, excuse me falling into reddit habits there with the Uniting Church link in part 2)
ReplyDeletePart 3
As a teenager I had become interested in a variety of 'fringe' beliefs - psychics, telekinesis, alien abductions and a bunch of other stuff. Someone responded to one of these sets of claims with strong skepticism and afterward I sat and considered how to answer that skepticism. I found myself unable to provide a convincing argument nor any solid evidence, and realized that particular set of claims was a house of cards. I applied the same idea, one by one over a period of years to each of the other fringe beliefs and every single one fell before it as little more than wishful thinking and a willingness to accept claims without solid evidence.
Eventually, though it took me much longer to apply it there, that caught up with all my supernatural beliefs. I couldn't give a single solid reason that wasn't also wishful thinking and a willingness to just accept what someone claimed without real evidence.
> I guess we'll have to disagree on that. Just as a couple of examples: It makes good sense of morality,
Indeed, we'll have to disagree. I find some of the New Testament abhorrent morally, specifically some words directly attributed to Jesus. I'll leave aside Paul for now, but I could say the same about much more of what he said (or was attributed to him but may have been other authors, in the case of some of the epistles)
That's not to say there's not some value there, but the parts I see to be the most valuable aren't particularly unique to the bible.
> and why there's reason, hope and purpose in life
Well, again, I disagree. By my reading - and certainly by the way many Christians express it to me, the focus on hope and purpose isn't particularly about life, but directed toward its purported aftermath.
> I guess you don't care about these,
I wouldn't say I don't care about why there's reason and order, I care deeply about that. I just don't see the direct connection there, except in the sense that "a supernatural deity implies the appearance of design" might be a plausible premise (though not a necessary one); turning it around doesn't follow.
> In contrast, on atheism, I don't see any reason to expect to see what we do see.
I'm confused here. What would you expect to see if there were no deities and why?
This is plainly a universe not built for us; roughly 10^22 stars, give or take an order of magnitude or so, and a universe where, as Brian Cox points out, life is only possible for the tiniest fraction of its existence. What percentage of the universe is inimical to life? So near to 100% as to fill the line with 9s. Indeed, the earth isn't *particularly* suited to life - the earliest major extinction event we know of was caused by rising oxygen levels. It took quite a long time before life forms evolved to exploit the poison. And it won't be habitable for more than a fraction of the time life has been here so far.
The stage, as Feynman pointed out with droll understatement, is too big for the play.
> I don't see a worthwhile answer to nihilism (feel free to suggest one),
Again, I don't understand. Are you saying that if there's no deity, you don't see how there can be a purpose to existence? (Would that part not simply constitute argument from ignorance? I see purpose to my life, but I wouldn't try to convince another atheist that it's theirs, and I wouldn't expect it to even hope to engage you; we're not even in a similar paradigm. Many atheists find plenty of purpose, but it's generally purpose of their own.)
Even if we take it as given that no deity necessarily implies nihilism (which I don't), how is that in any way an argument for a deity? Isn't that simply the fallacy of argument from consequences?
Part 4
ReplyDelete> Some simple other simple questions, you might like to answer are, why, based on atheism, should we expect that there even something rather than nothing?
Okay, this fundamentally misunderstands atheism. It's absence of belief in gods. Lack of god-belief doesn't give a basis to answer those questions. To expect atheism to provide answers like that is to kick at a straw man.
I will, however, point to discussion by a couple of physicists - who do consider these questions.
This argument assumes that, without a god, we wouldn’t expect anything to exist. But we presently have no way of assessing the probabilities involved and can't say it's a reasonable assumption.
Victor Stenger put it this way:
> What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since "nothing" is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.
> As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable."
So everything you see may have been the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking from a simple zero-energy state. (We don't know for sure that it was..., but what we see is not inherently less plausible than nothing)
Sean Carroll says:
> Ultimately, the problem is that the question — "Why is there something rather than nothing?" — doesn't make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like "The most natural universe is one that doesn't exist" possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.
However, even if science had no answers at all, the common response to "we don't know yet" of "therefore, god" is the fallacy of argument from ignorance. (even moreso is the non-sequitur of "therefore this god over here, the one in this book".)
But as I say, these are not answers from atheism. The notion is absurd.
> Why should we expect that the universe be ordered?
I point again to Carroll's words.
Part 5
ReplyDelete> Why do humans have intrinsic value?
Because we say they do. Our morals - what we feel to be right and wrong - have several sources, partly evolved, partly cultural, partly based on other things.
That they’re partly evolved is easy to see; we share many similar moral sentiments (such as attitude and response to unfairness) with our nearest relatives and to a lesser extent with other animals that form social groups. But the kinds of things we reserve our greatest aversion to are common to a far wider range of other animals (usually those have obvious advantages to the well being of our genes)
That it’s partly cultural is easy to see – the Aztec attitude to sacrifice is very different to our own (and indeed is almost incomprehensible to our own sensibilities), but not entirely out of keeping with parts of the Old Testament, for example. I can give many cultural examples where something that is not simply acceptable, but moral, right and even essential in one culture is abhorrent in another.
That it's partly due to other things is easy to see - many changes in our moral sensibilities develop from logical or philosophical reasoning, and some of those proceed from premises based on, for example, considerations relating to symmetry / fairness, like the veil of ignorance or the first categorical imperative. Some of the premises for new morality develop from new factual information that comes to light (such as from science). Clearly our collective morals are not like the morals of 3000 years ago, or of 1000 years ago, or even 150 years ago.
It's not simply morality bubbling up as a cultural phenomenon - the development of the new ideas and ways of thinking comes first and then becomes part of the culture.
If morality came from the bible, it would imply that people who had no exposure to the bible are less moral than those who have. Yet the people who committed those massacres I linked to were far more familiar with the bible than the population of today, yet it's the population of today that finds them unthinkable, not those that were familiar with the lessons in the bible. If the bible is the source of morality, it's remarkably ineffective, and generally seems to work just as well among people who have never heard of it.
> I think that there's a sliding scale between skepticism on one end (eg. denying holocaust, and the moon landings)
This is an egregious misrepresentation of skepticism, equating it with denialism. Skepticism asks for evidence, it doesn't say 'deny something in the face of obvious evidence'.
There's a standard of evidence to be met for any new claims in science. I'm not advocating a kind of scientism, but there should be a somewhat analagous standard of evidence for any claim not within the realm of ordinary experience. We apply analagous standards in the law for example.
A skeptic demands evidence because of the value of evidence, not because of the wish to maintain that something is false in spite of it. Actually, I find this a pretty low shot, because you're apparently characterizing the need for evidence *directly* as being equivalent to denialism. I ask you to find a way to reframe this one.
> where would you put yourself on the scale?
I reject your whole framing of the situation here.
> Do you think it is important to believe things which are true or only to reject things which are false?
Given the context of your immediately prior framing, I can't take your question seriously. I would think this question a very surprising one to seriously ask, and it appears to be part of the same framing.
Part 6
ReplyDelete> You seem to judge that the existence of God is incredibly unlikely ("extraordinary"), even before we even begin to consider the evidence. Why?
It's not probability (it's much too premature for that), but the size and nature of the claim relative to the things for which we have solid evidence for and our understanding of how they work. It is a positive claim for the existence of something has consequences for everything else
If my son claims he had cereal for breakfast, it's a claim with no consequences. If he claims to have invented a machine that produces gold from salt water, it's a claim that overthrows our understanding of how things work, and a claim with extraordinary consequences. It's an extraordinary claim before we even get to trying to think about probability
On what basis should we reliably assess claims? I point back to the words of Bertrand Russell - and indeed to the scientific method.
I have no experiences of any gods outside the books and stories. I have seen nothing that suggests or implies any gods.
Existence in books and stories puts gods no higher up the scale of *actual* existence than it does unicorns. I have seen people claim unicorns and fairies to be real (including people to whom I am related). Seriously real. I have had contact with people (e.g. in Iceland) who regard *elves* as real. To accept any of these claims - supernatural claims - as more than mythical would require some kind of evidence. Pretty serious evidence, because the world appears to be entirely natural, and entities that can act 'outside' the way things ordinarily work means we must change our entire understanding of those works. It would, in short, require abandoning rather a lot of how we understand things to work, and that requires
But gods have a harder task, because the claims are so much larger.
Indeed, what evidence would count against one? In what way is this not the biggest '[not even wrong](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)' there could be?
For an explanation for something to have explanatory power it should make specific predictions about what should be seen and what should not, while making the fewest assumptions needed.
If it has very low explanatory power, it is in some sense 'not an explanation'.
For example, if I explain a complex phenomenon in terms of simple precursors and interactions of simple forces following simple rules, I have in a very *particular* sense explained it.
If I attempt to explain it instead in terms of a more complex precursor, following unknown or unfathomable rules, I have in some sense failed to explain anything until I have an explanation for the precursor. If the explanation for the precursor is a shrug, it's not getting us anywhere - it's better to put the shrug in a step earlier, where the missing explanation was smaller.
I see there's a missing end off a sentence in part 6
ReplyDelete> It would, in short, require abandoning rather a lot of how we understand things to work, and that requires ...
... commensurately substantive evidence
Thanks for replying. I have any number of things to say in response... and because this is the Internet, and a lot louder people than me say a lot, I will :-). I'll try to keep it brief!
ReplyDeleteHope you are going great.
I do have a question that could fit at the end of part 6, one that I had intended to ask.
ReplyDeleteIs faith a reliable way of knowing things? Is it a way to learn things that are true?